Unified Self-Service

Last night I put together this quick introduction to how you can get started with VoiceObjects On-Demand. I show how you can start in VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse, deploy an application to Voxeo’s hosted cloud, login to Evolution to add phone numbers and configure SMS and IM, how you can modify an existing app and how you can create a new app:

 

Naturally you can head over to www.voxeo.com/vo-ondemand to try it out yourself!

In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll have more tutorial videos coming your way… stay tuned!

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).

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.