Talisma flavours CRM with BI

Talisma’s WebCentre 5 eCRM suite comes with analytical tools that pitch the product directly against CRM-enabled business intelligence tools from the likes of SAS. Akhtar Pasha analyses the company’s chances of widening its customer base by adding business intelligence to CRM

Nikhil Govindaraj

As business intelligence (BI) technology continues to mature, pure-play BI vendors such as SAS have started combining business analytics with customer relationship management (CRM). At the same time, enterprise software vendors such as Siebel, PeopleSoft and Infosys have added BI functionality to their CRM products. In the past, companies purchased analytical tools (reporting, data mining, OLAP, etc.) and CRM products separately.

Talisma was stuck in the operational CRM market due to the lack of BI functionality in previous versions of its CRM product. It hopes to change that with WebCentre and gain a foothold in the analytical CRM market, which is considered to be a faster growing market by industry analysts.

A foothold in analytical CRM
Talisma’s earlier CRM products, versions 2.4 and 4.0, were limited to e-mail- and chat-based customer support. The company was facing business pressure from analytical CRM vendors whose products had strong BI and data warehousing capabilities, quite natural when you consider that most of the so-called analytical CRM vendors were selling BI and data warehousing tools long before they dabbled in CRM. Nikhil Govindaraj, group program manager, Talisma Corporation says, “We were pitched against tough competitors like SAS, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Onyx, Kana and eGain in customer engagements.”

With WebCentre 5, Talisma wants to get a foothold in the analytical CRM market while continuing to sell to the operational CRM market. Analysts believe that combining operational and analytical aspects of CRM gives enterprises a strategic tool for retaining and attracting customers.

Pranav Kumar, research director-enterprise application software at Gartner Asia Pacific says, “It is critical that CRM applications talk to other enterprise applications such as ERP. Using analytical tools, data can be analysed online making it useful for increasing sales and retaining customers. Secondly, for a CRM vendor it provides the opportunity for higher business growth, especially in verticals such as telecom and banking & finance that have a large customer base. Companies operating in these verticals want to use the power of analytics.”

BI tools help enterprises monitor the ebb and flow of customer behaviour. This data can be used to up-sell and cross-sell products and services.

Aviva Life Insurance Company India is currently testing the beta version of WebCentre 5. Its manager-applications, Tarun Pandey says, “With the new version we can pull data from various servers running different applications (financial, CRM or sales). We are using Talisma’s advanced analytics and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tool in drill-down reports, customer data analysis and in corporate communications.” Aviva plans to fine-tune some of the features, including archiving and un-archiving, before it rolls out Talisma WebCentre in September this year.

Measuring RoI of CRM
Analytical tools will help organisations to measure their return on investment (RoI) on CRM. George Varghese, head-marketing, SAS India says, “Operational CRM can improve efficiency but it is difficult to calculate RoI. Additionally, operational CRM does not give you the tools that answer simple questions such as how to stop making same mistakes as my competitors? To calculate RoI, enterprises need to build organisational intelligence, customer intelligence and supplier intelligence to get a unified 360 degree view of customers, suppliers and organisations.”

Banks can use customer data to analyse high net worth individuals (HNWI) who are more profitable to them and target only those customers for their new products and services. Banks can also analyse the data to find out the reasons why you are banking with them. Enterprises can measure whether the money they spent on CRM was worth it.

Talisma targets contact centres
Talisma will be focusing on growing verticals such as contact centres/BPO and telecom markets. Ravi Chakravarty, director-sales, Asia Pacific, Talisma Corporation says, “There is a big market opportunity in selling CRM to BPO companies that are setting up their own call centres in India.” Talisma’s strategy will be target its existing customers such as ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Sony, Aviva, IDBI and others who are looking for upgrades from operational CRM to products that incorporate business intelligence in a CRM solution. Talisma has recently formed a strategic marketing alliance with Primus Knowledge Solution Inc. Primus provides knowledge management software to call centres. This alliance will help Talisma to increase its focus on call centres.

Currently Aviva Life Insurance and IDBI are using the beta of Talisma 5. Talisma expects four to five customer installations by the end of 2003.

Talisma need to add end-to-end BI capabilities to its CRM solution in order to get into the analytical CRM market and perhaps compete with SAS. What’s missing is business and predictive analytics. That said, there’s no doubt that Talisma taken some important steps in moving towards analytical CRM.