Unified Self-Service

Recently when I was discussing the whole concept of “Unified Self-Service” with someone, they asked me this:

I get the ROI benefits of “one application, many channels”, but why would I want the same user interface across all the different channels? Wouldn’t that lead to a poor user experience on some of the channels?

I paused and realized that clearly I needed some more caffeine or something, as I’d obviously not been clear in what I was saying. I went on to explain that:

One application DEFINITELY does not mean only ONE user interface!

Very definitely NOT. This isn’t Highlander, after all. The whole point of Unified Self-Service is that you can interact with customers across multiple channels using:

• one application
• one development environment / tool
• one set of logs
• one set of analytics
• one team of developers

Instead of having 6 different teams of developers creating apps for each channel, using six different development tools, six different services, six different analytics packages, etc…. instead you can have one combined set of tools.

The user experience, however, can be completely different between the channels. For example, consider an app providing voice, IM, SMS, Twitter and mobile web:

• With the voice channel in a typical IVR scenario you might want to greet the caller with “Thank you for calling” and then guide them through a typical set of menus.
• Over in text-based channels like IM, SMS or Twitter, you might instead want to ask only a single question – or even better just start processing the input sent by the user in the initial message. (And for Twitter and SMS you have to worry about size limits or splitting messages.)
• For the mobile web, you may have a web page with graphics that correspond to choices similar to what you had in the voice IVR, but perhaps without a menu of options, i.e. all presented on the main screen.

All of these are design decisions you make while creating your application… you certainly could create an app with a nearly identical user interface across channels… and if done really well that might work. Or you can tweak the interface for each channel to interact with customers in the most appropriate ways for those channels. Whatever you do the tools you use to create that app should help you in creating the best customer experience possible. Our tools certainly do.

If you’d like to learn more about creating multi-channel applications, you can:

• Read our Unified Self-Service Whitepaper
• Download the T-Mobile case study about Mobile Self-Service
• View the archive of our Developer Jam Sessions where several have explained how this kind of development can be done, particularly with our VoiceObjects tool
• Read about creating Tropo applications that respond differently to different channels