Talisma Corp.’s Talisma 6.0 provides a comprehensive CRM solution, targeting most basics for enterprise SFA, marketing, and customer service, available as either a hosted solution or as a boxed application for in-house deployment. I accessed the hosted version through the new WAN client, which spawns a Citrix NFuse data connection to a Windows 2000 server running Talisma. The application performed well and provided a native-looking UI, but it is certainly less elegant than a self-contained remote client, and it will require in-house deployments to run a Citrix infrastructure.
The latest release makes improvements to its OLAP reporting and includes a new administrative delegation feature for better team-based management. In addition, the move to a three-tier architecture in Version 6.0 will allow Talisma to handle larger customer bases.
Version 6.0’s customer interaction hub, a self-service feature that integrates with a company’s Web site, allows customers to search a built-in knowledge base for answers to problems or to check the status of trouble tickets. Session tracking and alerting has been improved, and new features have been added to the live Web chat engine. For example, using the new co-browsing feature, I could control a user’s browser session and push links to products or Help FAQs.
I also liked Talisma’s workspace set-up and management. Fully customizing a user’s workspace with targeted views is beneficial. And the option for creating multiple profiles was very useful, allowing me to log on with a view suited to my current task.
