Talisma wants to increase CIM business share

Talisma Corporation is positioning itself as a leading player in a space it claims to have created, called CIM or Customer Interaction Management. The company's revenue spilt between its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and CIM is currently 50:50. The company's president and CEO Dan Vetras plans to increase the CIM business. He shared information on the CIM market, the Talisma's solutions and future business expansion plans to Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News.

You have been advocating the concept of CIM as opposed to CRM. What is the difference between the two?

We have been positioning a new acronym Customer Interaction Management (CIM) for the last two years and have almost created this new category. CRM in its early days was a repository for managing stagnant information and is about managing customer data and not customer interactions. CIM helps in managing live interactions that come into the customer service effort. It allows our customers to have a repository of data and contact customers through various channels such as phone, e-mail, chat and self-service. It allows customers to track customer records and also provides reporting and analytics. This is very useful for agents who can now not just save the data, but also get a picture of customer history. Enterprises can also stem knowledge loss due to agent turnover through CIM since all the information is not lost when an employee leaves. One can offer better customer service with various modes of channels like email, chat, VoIP, phone and self-service. We also plan to add SMS as an additional channel. CIM appeals to customers because it allows them to upsell and cross-sell their products to customers.

estimates the CIM market to touch $1 billion by 2008 while Datamonitor projects the multi-channel contact center market to grow to $2.2 billion in FY'08.

Most of the information resides on the KnowledgeBase platform. Our product can support any other CRM solutions and is vendor-neutral. It is possible to feed the CRM system bi-directionally.

How have Talisma's solutions done in India and globally?

In India we are targeting the BFSI and BPO market segments. In the US, we are also targeting the higher education segment where students and alumni need to stay connected to their institutions. With CRM coming into the picture, many universities are doing away with published material. Our solution can also help match test scores like SAT and GMAT for recruitment.

We added 68 new global clients in the quarter ended March 31st 2006. Worldwide, we have around 700 plus active customers. In India, we have 90 customers. BPOs like HTMT, iSeva and iGate's BPO operations. Typically, large BPOs prefer to build it on their own. But our solution is something proven, tried and tested. We plan to have a joint go-to-market strategy with BPOs since they can provide value addition to customers with CIM.

Do you plan to tap any new markets?

We plan to have partners in new markets like the Middle East, Europe, China, Hong Kong, Japan and New Zealand. We plan to expand our presence in Australia, China and Europe.

We doubled our revenues in 2005 to $25 million and this year, we are targeting $30 million. We are profitable.

Who are your main competitors in the CIM space?

Our competitors are legacy e-mail management companies like eGain and Kana, which don't offer a broad range of channels like we do. There are newer companies like LivePerson and RightNow, which are bigger rivals.

What functionalities are you adding on to your next version of products?

We want to add the SMS channel this year to our CIM solution. The next version of our product will be out in August which will feature multiple service packs, additional channels, backend connectors, improve the scalability, support AJAX and have tools to improve agent productivity.

Are you looking to buy companies?

We are looking for acquisitions in the VoIP area since we would like to own that technology. We also intend to acquire companies in Customer Interaction Management (CIM) space based in North America or Europe. We are interested in deals in the $5-$10 million category that can provide us with technologies like VoIP or provide us with market share in a particular geography.

We are also planning to go public on a stock exchange like the Bombay Stock Exchange, London AIM market or the Toronto exchange, later this year or in early 2007.

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