London, UK – Nov. 14, 2006 – Talisma® Corporation (www.talisma.com), the market leader in enterprise Customer Interaction Management (CIM) solutions, today announced Talisma CIM 8.0, the most innovative product on the market for addressing companies’ unified-channel interaction management needs. The latest edition of the cutting-edge offering introduces two new products, Talisma Voice and Talisma Campaign, and includes numerous enhancements to existing channels, empowering organisations to proactively engage customers and prospects to further enhance the customer experience, improve service quality, and uncover new business opportunities.

“Talisma is always finding fresh, innovative ways to improve customer service,” said Ian Bodsworth, European Customer Interaction Manager, EPSON.  “With version 8.0, Talisma has exceeded our expectations for an integrated customer service solution by offering a product that will provide everyone with an opportunity to make the most of each customer interaction. I see CIM 8.0 leading to greater customer loyalty and increased customer spending because of the new proactive capabilities.”

Talisma Voice allows companies to offer Web site visitors instant access to a live agent using Voice over Internet technology, providing rapid, personalised service. To use the technology, visitors simply click a button on the site to establish a voice connection with an agent directly to their computer. Talisma Voice helps organisations by providing online instantaneous voice communication to increase customer satisfaction, reduce Web site abandonment, and drive increased sale closure rates, while at the same time reducing telephony infrastructure costs.

Talisma Campaign enables contact centres to facilitate a continuous customer dialog and proactively deflect inbound emails and telephone calls by educating, alerting, and informing customers about product updates, billing notifications, and profile updates.  The real-time offer engine enables companies to create personalised offers to send to customers based on a customer’s response to a previous campaign, the customer’s profile, or their current Web site activity. Talisma Campaign can also distribute up-sell and cross-sell promotions to agents to deliver to customers based on the customer’s profile and interaction history.
 
CIM 8.0 Enhancements
Unified Communication Channels
Talisma Chat includes an enhanced Web Collaboration component that scales to support a significant number of agents co-browsing with Web site visitors, and includes Web form filling and Web page pushing.  These features are especially useful for shopping cart transactions, technical support tickets, and completing financial forms.  Administrators can assign collaboration capabilities to individual agents or groups of agents, with advanced administrative features to support contact centres of all sizes.

Talisma Email provides agents with enhanced search capabilities. Companies can also leverage Talisma Answer, an advanced Talisma Email add-on module, to intelligently automate the creation and delivery of email responses. Talisma Knowledgebase supports regional settings, non-English characters and character sets in the glossary, and is certified on Japanese OS and SQL in Japanese locale.   The release also introduces soft phone capabilities in Talisma Phone that enhance agent transfer options and enable agents to prioritise calls by channel.

The agent desktop offers an improved Agent Client with a new GUI that allows designated supervisors or users to customise agent workspaces. Contained in the agent workspace are configurable panels that host customer communication utilities, access to enterprise data and applications, views of real-time performance monitoring which are easy to navigate and result in optimised agent productivity.

Customer Interaction Management HUB
The most significant enhancement to the CIM Hub is the addition of the advanced Proactive features included in Talisma Voice and Talisma Chat.   The two products leverage a Proactive Rule Builder, allowing administrators to configure business processes to determine when to push a proactive chat or voice invitation to a Web site visitor. Administrators can also configure the system to identify appropriate opportunities to contact a site visitor based on their presence on a particular Web page or length of time on a Web page, and specify conditions based on attributes such as the customer’s browsing behaviour, the value of their shopping cart, or whether they have been receptive to a chat or voice interaction in the past.

For example, a retailer can use Talisma Chat or Voice to secure a sale with a customer who is demonstrating difficulty completing a purchase in the shopping cart area of the site. The proactive capabilities of Talisma Chat and Voice are also useful to aid a customer who may be seeking product or service support and is stranded on a Web site. The system, or agent, can initiate an interaction in order to help the customer find the needed information.

The CIM Hub also includes a new administrative Chat Workflow Builder, triggering actions based on pre-defined chat events such as start, end, or transfer of a chat session.

Cross-Channel Reporting
CIM 8.0 includes a Real-time Dashboard and Historical Report Builder that graphically represent continuously refreshed statistics in a variety of graph formats including lines, gauges, and bars. It also includes new analytical capabilities allowing businesses to compare proactive versus reactive chat and voice interactions, using metrics such as acceptance, refusal, and end session actions. 

“Our company vision has always been to enable businesses to provide an exceptional customer experience,” said Dan Vetras, President & CEO, Talisma.  “Talisma CIM 8.0 furthers that vision by emphasising the importance of our pervasive and proactive capabilities.  The enhancements to our CIM suite help companies take advantage of business opportunities and improve operational efficiencies.  Talisma CIM 8.0 will not only address market demands for an integrated solution that can handle any channel of interaction, but will also help businesses improve customer satisfaction and enhance the overall customer experience.”

Talisma CIM 8.0 is scheduled for release in February, 2007.