BANGALORE: Talisma Corporation Pvt. Ltd, a provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, has launched its next generation Sales Force Automation Solution aimed at improving productivity of the sales team.  

Raj Mruthyunjayappa, Managing Director, Talisma’s Asia-Pacific Operations, said, “According to research analysts sales people have been selling only 40 percent of the time. The rest of the time is spent on administration, sending e-mails, making reports, etc. Our goal is to take it much higher.”

The software an upgrade to the existing solution is a ‘point and click’ mobile workforce solution like a mobile CRM and is positioned as a saleforce productivity enhancement tool.

The ability to launch a mobile conversation through the software, record and replay is one of its unique features, says Mruthyunjayappa.   “From a business user standpoint good business intelligence has been built into the software. Behavioral intelligence can be obtained from both sales team and the customer side such as – what time of the day people prefer what mode of communication, profiling of the customers based on band, segments, prices or locations.”

In response to a query on Web 2.0 integration, Mruthyunjayappa said that the company has plans to build a social networking environment such as Facebook, Myspace or LinkedIn onto the product. “The R&D is currently going on for the next version. We have other things like IM (Instant Messenger) which is currently a one to one media but,  we are planning to  build a business to customer chat into the next version,” he adds.

Commenting on the cloud computing buzz, Mruthyunjayappa said, “Cloud computing can be loosely termed as Saas especially because of the portal services. (If customers are) leveraging the back-end infrastructure of Talisma, it is cloud computing. Its more of a jazz word because our Saas services are in place for 9 years.”

As for customers looking to tap into the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) services, Mruthyunjayappa says that CIOs from BFSI segment are a lot more conservative compared to other verticals due to various RBI guidelines, while BPOs and KPOs are more open to adopting SaaS.