Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Don’t let the name fool you. Campus Management, which acquired Talisma’s brand, CRM, and educational product lines from nGenera last month, plans to be a growing player through its purchase in the CRM solutions space.

 

When you think of the term ‘Campus Management’, visualize office campuses with smartphone-addicted executives walking briskly instead of ivy-covered college buildings with students walking around, because this firm is as aggressive as its competitors. It offers a rugged and popular ecosystem of accounting, billing, business management, and HR solutions.

 

The Talisma brand is marketed and supported by operations in Bellevue, Washigton and Bangalore, India. Partners in Asia Pacific and Europe extend its reach worldwide. When it comes to marketing, they practice what they preach: using Talisma CRM and also a knowledge base product for e-mail campaigns, live chat, and online self-help for users of the products.

 

“Our heritage is in the dominance of the proprietary career education market, with clients such as Career Education Corporation, Corinthian Colleges, Education Management Corporation, and Kaplan, some of which are billion-dollar, publicly traded companies,” explains Tim Gilbert, Campus Management’s chief marketing officer. ”We are acutely attuned to the fast pace, the high demands, and the quick evolution of the business-driven enterprise. Higher education is very much becoming a consumer kind of model where you must engage students more quickly and strategically.”

 

Campus Management plans to continue to grow Talisma’s presence in its present banking, technology, travel and other key sectors in the Asian and European markets. It is also seeking new customers in the healthcare, nonprofit, pharmaceuticals, and retail fields.

 

Gilbert sees Talisma CRM fulfilling a large, middle of the road need between big, complex solutions such as Oracle/Siebel and smaller SMB-suited offerings such as Salesforce.com with a best of both worlds solution that is full-featured and is flexible, easy-to-install, and affordable. Talisma’s India operations will serve a dynamic role, expanding the business outside of higher education.

 

Think of Talisma then as a campus within a college or corporation. Campus Management will keep and grow the Talisma brand through its Bangalore, India business unit, Talisma Corporation Pvt. Ltd. The 170-member staff there will serve Talisma’s existing and new clientele in key business sectors. Campus Management, headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, will continue its worldwide market focus on higher education.

 

“Talisma’s CRM solution is a great alternative to giant, complex, and challenging-to-implement CRM platforms,” explains Gilbert. “A lot of times companies turn to Talisma because it is easy to use, and quick to install with many features. If you are a business unit or department in a large corporation you can get what you need from Talisma very quickly.”

 

Campus Management is at the same time planning to introduce Talisma CRM to its core college market by integrating the solution with its educational products ecosystem to offer the additional functionality to permit what it calls an ‘elegant, student lifecycle management solution.’

 

“Talisma serves some of the leading institutions like INSEAD, Johnson & Wales and University of Nebraska,” explains Gilbert. “The acquisition really helps us leapfrog not only our CRM program but our opportunity to serve more and more of the leading colleges and universities.”

 

Gilbert explains that Talisma’s full range of features such as automating campaigns that are tailored to respond to consumer signals, rich reporting for determining campaign quality and contact center agent performance, and its ease of installment make it a very attractive proposition for both for-profit and nonprofit colleges.

 

He points out colleges are facing increased competition to recruit and retain students and at the same time they are becoming increasingly dependent on them as alumni to generate funds, such as for program development and student assistance. In response, these schools are finding that they must treat students like valuable customers with lifecycle management.

 

The integration helps under-resourced admissions offices to do more recruiting and tailor their messaging directly to the student’s greatest areas of interest. For education, Talisma automates communications and triggers reminders to perform specific tasks. As today’s students now apply to more and more colleges at once, it is more important than ever for the institution to be as responsive (and swift) as possible.

 

“There is a convergence going on where these schools are buying business-styled applications like CRM, which Datamonitor predicts will spend over $200 million on such systems in 2009,” observes Gilbert. “The Talisma CRM solution positions us well to grow in this market as it has been designed and is proven from the ground up as a business solution.”