In-Depth

In Brief: Oracle Sales suite, WebCenter 5.0

Oracle Sales usability, proposal-generation enhancements; WebCenter 5.0 manages cross-channel customer interactions with real-time chat and collaboration

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 05/28/2003

Oracle Corp. last week announced version 11.5.9 of Oracle Sales, its customer relationship management (CRM) suite.

Oracle says that the new version of Oracle Sales is enhanced with usability features that help to make sales representatives more effective. The suite includes a new component, called Oracle Proposals.

Oracle Proposals automates the process of creating customer proposals by generating customer-ready personalized proposals from templates for sales professionals.

Other Oracle Sales components include Oracle Field Sales, Oracle TeleSales, Oracle Sales Offline, Oracle Quoting, Oracle Incentive Compensation and Oracle iStore.

Oracle Quoting has been enhanced with a new user interface and tighter integration with Oracle Order Management. The result, the company says, is that sales representatives can now create and update quote lines within a single screen, as well as use external information to check the credit worthiness of customers during the quoting process.

Other enhancements to the Oracle Sales suite include new functionality in its Oracle Field Sales component that allows sales professionals to register prospects for marketing events directly from the sales system; new personalization features for Oracle Incentive Compensation; and new functionality in Oracle Sales Offline to provide sales representatives with information and access to information even when they’re offline.

Talisma Enhances CSM Offering

Talisma announced Talisma WebCenter 5.0, its fifth generation customer service management (CSM) suite.

Talisma WebCenter 5.0 is an integrated platform for managing cross-channel customer interactions. It includes real-time chat, collaboration and instant messaging capabilities.

Talisma says that WebCenter 5.0 can integrate pre- and post-sales customer information, knowledge management, and reporting. The company says enhancements to WebCenter 5.0 could enable companies to transition from telephony-only interactions to web-driven collaborative customer service.

WebCenter 5.0 supports multi-contact queuing, routing, management, and threaded interactions. It provides agents with an integrated view of customer communications within a single Outlook-style window.

The product also supports automated logging per single point of entry, which Talisma says eliminates the need to manually update systems with interaction details and results.

Finally, WebCenter 5.0 boasts improved real-time collaboration in the form of chat, Instant Messaging, and collaborative web conferencing capabilities; enhanced analytics, including trend analysis, packaged OLAP cubes, and a dashboard; and integrated prospect management and campaign tools that manage the lifecycle of customer experience.

See http://www.talisma.com for more details.