Talisma and managing the customer experience effectively

It appears that everyone is now talking about managing the customer experience and, from a lot of what I have heard, for many vendors it is as though they have discovered something new and exciting. However, at its heart a good customer experience is not about anything new, complex, or innovative, it is about doing all of the little things well, so that you are treated, as you would want to be, with intelligence, respect and integrity. It is therefore of real satisfaction to see that there are vendors out there who are really getting to the nub of Customer Interaction Management and Talisma, with the release of the 8th version of their customer service, sales and support suite, to my mind are providing their customers with all of the right tools to deliver a really very good customer experience.

We all now spend a large proportion of our time shopping on the web, be it for goods or for services and, very often, as much as we want to buy, we are prevented from doing so by not being able to navigate the site effectively. When that happens, how many times have you said to yourself if only I could talk to someone I am sure they could point me in the right direction. With Talisma VoIP, companies can now offer site visitors instant access to a real agent who can talk them through the issue, imagine how that would improve your view of dealing with such a company. The tool also enables agents to switch seamlessly between using a web chat to actually talking directly using VoIP to the customer, there is no switching of agents, it is a natural transition to ensure that the customer is served with the best means possible to address their needs.

Talisma also offer a Real-Time Offer Engine, which is an increasingly important component of how companies want to be able to interact with their customers. As more and more of us sign up to preference lists to stop being inundated with useless direct mail and unsolicited phone offers, it becomes vital to make the most of all customer initiated contacts. When you have successfully addressed a customer issue is the best time possible to talk to them about a timely, relevant offer. Indeed research shows that such offers are not seen as marketing or selling; if done properly they are seen as the provision of useful further information.

Similarly Talisma Campaign can use rules to alert people of events having taken place, such as an electronic invoice being available to view, so that they can take the appropriate actions and have peace of mind that things have all been tackled at the appropriate time, while reducing pressure on the customer service team.

With Talisma Answer, the suite is able to build parameter driven rules to accelerate customer service responsiveness to email communication. This can, for example, route emails to appropriate agents, automatically suggesting appropriate responses and sending automatic acknowledgements.

The new Talisma CIM suite also allows the GUI to be modified to suit roles. This enables the training curve required to introduce the tool to be kept to a minimum, but at the same time does not restrict what can be done in the longer term. The system can be introduced and made to mimic existing capabilities as the confidence of the agents grows. New functionality can be switched on without the need for external support from the vendor or an in-house IT function, so that the reactive agents of today can be converted into the revenue generators of tomorrow without the need for a big bang and all of the associated upheaval.

There are other features that show the same attention to detail that marks this out as a product that is being designed to address real world issues with elegant pragmatic solutions. The suite is one of those products that seem to be hitting all of the right points at the moment, being essentially a mid market offering, so it offers all of the vital functionality with few of the costly frills associated with enterprise solutions. All this in a package that can be delivered as a hosted solution or run in-house, at a price point which is attractive, with very high quality, and which can now be used from the smallest of internet businesses to large enterprises and departments within multi-nationals with confidence that it will address the real need to maximise the customer experience at a price that will enable profit to be maximised.