Unified Self-Service

When our CEO tells people that he believes 50% of voice self-service will be dead in 5 years, people often look at him like he’s insane. I mean, after all, voice self-service is what we have historically offered here at Voxeo and we are today the largest worldwide provider of VoiceXML hosting. But he’s very serious! He believes half of self-service will move from IVR to SMS, IM, web-chat and social channels by 2015. We’ve seen the trends ourselves in both our own personal usage and watched the research. Voice will certainly still be used for a long time and probably for some folks it will always be their channel of choice. But the trends are clear… consumers are looking for alternate ways to communicate.

Don’t just take our word for it, though… please join us for a FREE WEBINAR on Thursday, February 18, at 1pm US Eastern where Opus Research Senior Analyst Dan Miller will dive into their new research about what communications channels consumers are using and which channels they prefer to use. I (Dan York) will be joining Dan Miller to then talk about how you can use Voxeo’s platforms to thrive and grow with those changes.

If you can’t make the session tomorrow, the webinar will be archived for later viewing. Check back here on our Unified Self-Service blog for more details (and I’ll update this post as well).

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Analyst firm, In-Stat, reports that more than 2 trillion mobile messages are sent per day globally.  The popularity of SMS (texting) is staggering.  Add to that increasing adoption of instant messaging, the mobile web, video, and social networks like Twitter and one thing is clear: Your customers are communicating in new ways. How will you adapt?

Complementing your customer self-service strategy with additional interaction channels can result in improved customer service, measurable cost savings, and increased revenue. The value is bigger than you might think… but what about the effort? Too many companies are missing opportunities due to the belief that adding new channels is complex, expensive, and resource intensive. In fact, migration to multi-channel self-service is incredibly easy with the right platform and tools. 

Learn how your company can benefit from expanding the ways in which you communicate with your customers. Voxeo’s latest whitepaper uncovers the value of multi-channel customer self-service and presents a clear, easy migration path for getting started. 

Click here and download a copy instantly.

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Imagine that you want to expand the self-service options you offer your customers beyond simply a voice IVR system. You would like to offer your customers the ability to get information from your company via SMS from their mobile phones. Or via IM on whatever IM service they use. Or through a mobile web browser. Or through social networking channels like Twitter or Facebook. Your goal is to:

Connect your customers to the information they want over the communication channel of their choice – as fast as you can.

What do you do?

Do you…

• Ask your web team to look at how to do a mobile web offering, find another team who can work on an IM interaction, ask your marketing team if they can handle the social channels, ask the IVR or phone team if they can look into SMS, talk to your business systems team to figure out how to give all these different offerings access to back-end databases, ask your business analysts to tie all of these into your business intelligence dashboard; or

• Write a single application that interacts with customers across all those channels.

We know the choice we’d pick. What about you?

Now stop imagining.

This is what Voxeo allows you to do right now.

Today.

The essence of what we call “Unified Self-Service™” is the idea that you have:

• one application
• one development environment
• one set of analytics

• many channels of customer interaction

Create you application once, using whatever tool or suite of tools you want to use – and allow it to interact with customers in whatever channel they choose to use. On the back end, have it connect into whatever analytics or business intelligence solutions you use and deliver into that system usage data across all those channels.

Better yet, take an existing voice IVR application and enable it to interact across all those channels.

Full multi-channel customer interaction using a single application – running on our either our hosted platform or on your premise. Delivering on the very real business value of:

• Enhancing customer service.
• Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Lowering customer service costs.
• Increasing revenue.

In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll be explaining here on this site the business value of Unified Self-Service, how it has been implemented by organizations, what the view of the industry is, and most importantly, how you can get started.

Please join us in this journey – follow us on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s an exciting time… and there are exciting stories to tell … and rewards to realize.

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.