eCRM: Using Talisma

You can’t escape CRM. A customer relationship management system lets you

share information across customer interface units. This helps you respond faster

to customers, and analyze usage patterns, complaints, trends, feedback and other

data and use this to retain customers and keep them happy. More complex CRM

systems include apps for sales force automation, etc, and may even talk to

production systems.

Talisma is an eCRM package. eCRM here refers more to a subset of the CRM

spectrum: Talisma specializes in e-channels of customer interaction. Evolved

from a basic e-mail helpdesk system over the years, it aims to improve customer

response time, and manage and analyze customer feedback and responses better.

Who’s using CRM?

Most service organizations, mid-size enterprises upward, are good candidates

for a basic CRM system. "Service" spans a wide spectrum, even pizza

delivery. Anyone with frequent customer interaction could use CRM.

Several departments interact with customers: sales, customer support,

marketing. This could be face to face, by phone, e-mail, or Web. A CRM package

can integrate most of these channels to record the interactions. With phone or

face-to-face meetings, a salesperson can file a report into the CRM client or

browser interface.

There’s a big training benefit too. A new salesperson can use the CRM

system to quickly learn about his customers and their past history, payment

records and so on. He’s then better prepared when he interacts with the

customer, and can give him more intelligent experience-based guidance.

Service companies face many customer interactions. Our publications group

itself gets thousands of e-mails, phone calls and letters from subscribers. The

conventional way: collect all this in one place and then distribute it. Tracking

this is a nightmare. A subscriber says she’s written twice without a response.

Can we tell her the status without having to check?

An eCRM package like Talisma can help by keeping all the mail in one place,

distribute it automatically to the people concerned and track and analyze

responses. The mail could for instance, be mapped to our different magazine

teams, with specific people designated for customer response.

We could follow the life cycle of a customer communication, monitor open

cases, unanswered mails and generate reports on how many cases a week are

resolved. Technical queries can be routed to specialists. And mails not replied

to in a given time can escalate automatically.

Leaner CRM

Talisma’s latest version provides companies a well-featured, stable system

catering to sales and marketing activities, including acquiring and retaining

customers. This eCRM Suite now has a better interface, and stronger analysis

tools that let you easily track customer trends with a few clicks.

Talisma is "lighter" than the big CRM apps from Siebel and

PeopleSoft. It runs on Windows NT, while the big apps run on diverse platforms,

typically Unix strains such as Solaris or HP/UX, or IBM systems. If you’re

already running a Windows environment and the features suit you, then Talisma is

a contender.

What will you miss out on? Talisma is more of a customer response integration

and analysis tool, rather than a sales force automation system such as you could

expect from the big CRM apps. But leaner apps and feature set also means that it’s

quicker to deploy. Deployment is a big barrier to CRM, and the siebel genre can

take many months and crores of rupees. So for those whose needs are covered by

the leaner feature set, quick deployment is a real saver. A closer comparison

would be with eCRM suites like E.piphany’s E.5. While we have not tested those

competing systems, users report Talisma having an edge in deployment ease, and

in its graphical interface.

Using Talisma

Talisma’s server runs on Windows 2000 or NT 4. Installation took time, but

a wizard took us through the process. We also needed Excel and various NT add-on

components. The installer checked for SQL Server, and where it didn’t find it,

installed an embedded version. The clients run on any recent version of Windows,

with some components added on. We also required Excel and Outlook there.

We created sales, marketing and other teams, mapping them to our

organizational structure, and designated users in each team to interact with the

customers using the Talisma clients. We defined the permissions and access

levels for each user individually, but you can also create generic

"roles" such as regional manager–representing a defined set of

permissions–and associate users with specific roles.

Customer responses go out from the team name alias you create, and not the

individual users on that team. There’s a pair of aliases, for incoming and

outgoing mail. A rules wizard helped us establish the routing of requests–for

instance, all e-mails to sales@dqindia.com would go to a designated team member.

If she can’t handle it, it goes go to a senior manager. Unanswered mail

escalates to the national sales manager after two days.

Custom reports could track weekly product sales, the number of interactions

resolved in a week, etc.

Once the server is configured, sales and service reps can

start logging in to interact with customers. We used the Power client, which has

a neat interface, with the teams and users nicely arranged in the left-hand

panel, and options to create accounts, contacts, mailers, campaigns, etc. You

can quickly view a history of past interactions with a customer. If a user can’t

answer a particular query, it can be moved to another user, or to an outside

specialist. Performance and response was snappy, though it is best tested in

live deployments.

The deployment ease suggests that even mid-size enterprises

can use eCRM effectively. But can they afford it? A 10-user Talisma

implementation is about Rs 20 lakhs. This is likely to remain a large-enterprise

app, as Talisma’s customer list suggests, unless the pricing changes–or

there are alternatives like ASP delivery in India.

A Dataquest report.

Product tests by Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs, Gurgaon.

edit@dqindia.com