CRM's Talisma Announces Version 8.1 of Knowledgebase

By David Sims

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Talisma Corporation, an nGenera company and Customer Interaction Management software product provider, today announced version 8.1 of the Talisma Knowledgebase (News - Alert) with what company officials say are “enhancements to search capabilities.”

 

The new functionality is intended to improve service quality by providing powerful search technology to contact center agents and Web self service customers.

 

“With its advanced search capability, the Talisma Knowledgebase steps ahead of the competition and significantly improves first contact resolution rates with knowledge driven web self service and assisted service,” said Dan Vetras, president and chief executive officer of Talisma.

 

The new search capabilities in Talisma Knowledgebase include concept matching, which builds a conceptual understanding of content and ranks search results by relevance to the user’s query, and automatic summarization, which adds value to search results by dynamically building and displaying summaries for each document returned, making it easier for users to identify the right document before they click to view it.

 

With the new “Auto Recommend” feature, Talisma officials say, Knowledgebase “builds hyperlinks between related documents based on its conceptual understanding of content, eliminating manual linking and maintenance.”

 

There’s also the Direct Link Search Results, the feature which takes users directly to the relevant section of a document, even extremely long documents, and large PDFs.

 

In addition to these enhancements, the Talisma Knowledgebase search functionality includes Federated and Progressive Search features that give users access to remote sites and repositories and powerful tools for refining searches on the fly. Users will also benefit from spelling correction which automatically suggests possible alternative spellings, a synonym engine, and the ability to ignore specific words.

 

Last week Talisma announced version 8.0 of their CRM for higher education. 

 

The newest version includes “complete Application Management, a next generation User Interface, 2-way Text Messaging, Personalized Web Portals, and an ADA compliant Web Client, in addition to numerous enhancements to the existing modules,” company officials say.

 

Nicole Engelbert, an analyst at Datamonitor, called 8.0 a “mature and comprehensive CRM product developed specifically for the higher education market.”

 

Company officials say the management module in 8.0 “includes all the features of a stand-alone product and is included within the CRM,” which means there is “no need to port data or integrate between systems, nor is there a need to incur a cost for a third party product.”

 

The Short Message Service text interaction channel is new to 8.0, giving institutions the ability to communicate with constituents via text messages. “Personalized text messages can be sent one-off or in bulk,” company officials say, adding that “constituents can initiate a new message or reply back to messages using their phone or PDA.”

 

8.0 also allows constituents to create personalized Web portals, customizing the content made available by the institution “as well as the look and feel of their personal Web portal.” Based on the preferences selected, Talisma officials say, “institutions can push targeted communications catering to the constituent’s interests.”