Talisma Beefs Up Contact Center Suite

How do you contact your customer-service representative? It all depends on your modus operandi -- telephone, fax, e-mail, electronic chat, voice-over-IP, Web-based self-help. Call it call-center convergence. And that's why CRM software developer Talisma unveiled a new version of its Talisma Contact Center Suite 4.4. earlier this week, boasting hundreds of new features and a flexible architecture. Indeed, one of the keys to greater adoption of a CRM system is flexibility, especially for customer-service representatives who sit at the cusp of the call center's brave new world. To this end, Talisma re-designed its Web client on .Net, in order to take advantage of emerging Web services. There's load balancing and failover support for electronic chat, a growing alternative to the phone for communicating with a call center representative. Talisma also offers an out-of-the-box customer portal. Now contact centers can wean customers off phone and to electronic touch points. "We made the customer portal much more easily configurable and integrated it with all the touch points," says Edward Yim, director of product marketing at Talisma. As customer move to electronic mediums, so does the range of a given call center. "Our largest customers are planning world wide rollouts," says Yim. This means Talisma had to build support for multiple languages, such as Spanish, German, French, and Japanese. There's also a contact center 'dashboard' that makes it easier for customer-service representatives to find information quickly.