Talisma Corporation TM today announced a major initiative that advances the company beyond Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and into the Customer Interaction Management (CIM) market. Datamonitor estimates that the CIM market will reach $2.6 billion by 2008, more than doubling the approximately $1.2 billion market today.* To date, Talisma has successfully delivered many of the largest enterprise CIM implementations in the world and is currently positioned as a leader in this growing market.

By bringing to bear its core competencies in CIM products and services, Talisma is able to augment legacy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems with real-time Customer Interaction Management (CIM) solutions. Talisma offers companies a path to take full advantage of all of the channels of communication that the Internet has spawned – email, chat, co-browse, knowledge-based self service, phone, and more. Talisma’s CIM solutions span all industry sectors and all major world markets with more than 600 global customer deployments. Additionally, Talisma now powers three of the world’s largest enterprise chat implementations delivering more than 50 million chat interactions a year, resulting in improved customer satisfaction, increased revenues, and greater agent productivity.

Talisma’s award-winning CIM solutions enable companies to more effectively communicate with their customers how and when their customers choose. To facilitate a 360-degree view of the customer, Talisma integrates communication channels with interaction history as well as legacy CRM data. With the wealth of information that is then provided, advanced analytics monitor, measure, and optimise channel usage and agent activity leading to a rapid and quantifiable return on investment.

Ian Bodsworth, Operations Manager of Epson UK, one of Talisma’s European customers commented: “Talisma CIM clearly provides EPSON with the solution needed to meet and exceed our customer service level commitments. We are especially excited about the deep integration of the Talisma solutions that allows us to further push the capabilities of our e-service and self help strategy, blended with the other channels of communication.”
* The Vertical Guide to Contact Centres in North America, Datamonitor (April 2004)

According to Dan Vetras, CEO and President of Talisma Corporation the company’s success, and subsequently, its customers’ successes, is testimony to Talisma’s ability to offer effective enterprise interaction management solutions that help increase customer loyalty levels, sales, and operational efficiencies while reducing support costs. “With mature CRM systems that are too data heavy for nimble interaction management, it’s clearly no longer a question of why, but when. Our customers already know what the rest of the business world is now learning, that interaction management is a requisite investment that’s good for business by delivering more effective support, improving sales, and driving efficiency throughout the enterprise,” commented Vetras.

The company’s push toward CIM solutions stems from the wide-scale migration from phone-centric to Internet-centric customer interactions. This migration is generating demand to provide multiple channels of communication and is leading to a dramatic increase in overall customer interaction volumes. Gartner Research estimates that the number of interactions between a typical business-to-consumer organisation and its customers is growing at a rate of 15 percent each year. The number of customer service related e-mails an organisation receives is growing at a rate of 20 percent every year. The number of self-service transactions that an organisation carries out with its customers is growing 25 percent per year.* While the customer demand for ‘channel choice’ is clear, global enterprises are also quickly recognising that effectively managing all customer communications goes well beyond installing separate channel solutions for each and every type of interaction.

With the combination of rapid interaction growth and proven customer results, Talisma is uniquely positioned to address the changing needs of today’s enterprises. “Customers increasingly make choices that were once left up to businesses. They choose the type, amount, and channel of information they prefer for interacting with the organisation, as opposed to being told what to use,” said Esteban Kolsky, Research Director, Gartner Research, Inc. “They look for speed of response, speed in processing transactions, and the speed at which organisations can update their interaction methods. For many organisations, meeting these challenges means adapting to a new customer service framework — revamping call centres and contact centres, embracing e-service and self-service, and integrating the customer service organisation with other departments.”

Talisma is supporting its corporate-wide CIM strategy with marketing activities that include a new Web site, free trial offers, and other strategic campaigns designed to cement its leadership CIM position.

For a free trial offer of Talisma CIM solutions, please visit http://www.talisma.com.