Unified Self-Service

Want to learn about how you can prepare your contact center for working with social media? Would you like to know more about the trends happening in the industry?

In about 24 hours, on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, at 2pm US Eastern time, I will be joining with Wendell Black from Contactual to discuss these changes and solutions in a free webinar:

Preparing Your Contact Center for the Rise of Social Media

It is free to join the session.

Here is the session abstract:

Social Media’s impacts to traditional methods of providing customer service cannot be ignored. More and more individuals are turning to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and similar forums to connect with businesses and organizations and this trend shows no signs of abating. In this session you will learn how to navigate the new world of the connected and sophisticated customer.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Important trends in multichannel and social media customer interaction methods
• How social media is impacting customer experience optimization efforts
• How organizations are leveraging multichannel interaction to better service their customers
• Benefits of an integrated approach to managing the proliferation of customer interaction touch points
• Important steps organizations can take now to prepare for these new communication mediums
• A glimpse into the future of customer contact as social media gains mainstream prominence

I’m looking forward to joining our partner Contactual in giving this session… and am looking forward to answering the questions attendees have as well.

Again, it’s free to register and there will be time for questions at the end. We’d love to have you join us!

As we talk about how you can get started with “Unified Self-Service” and creating multi-channel applications that interact with customers over voice, texting/SMS, video, mobile web, social channels like Twitter and more, it is useful to look at how some companies are already deploying unified self-service applications.

One such company is T-Mobile International. They used our VoiceObjects application lifecycle suite to build a “self-service in your pocket” portal that interacts with customers over voice, video, text and mobile web. A brief case study is available for download at the top of:

www.voxeo.com/about/case-studies.jsp

Attendees at our Customer Summit 2010 back in June got the chance to hear directly from T-Mobile representatives about their project and to ask questions. They’re definitely doing some great work getting customers the information they want in the fastest way over the communication channel of the customer’s choice.

Watch for more Unified Self-Service case studies to appear on that page as we add them – and if you are already deploying multi-channel apps on our platform and would like to be considered for a case study, please do drop us a line.

If you missed our July Developer Jam Session webinar on “Providing Self-Service Through SMS Applications“, you can download the slides and view the recording of the webinar on our Jam Sessions archive page:

http://developers.voiceobjects.com/tech-topics/monthly-jam-sessions/

In the session, Voxeo Senior Presales Consultant Tobias Göbel covered this:

Mobile self-service was long thought of as either Web-based or IVR-based. Voxeo is opening up new channels for customer self-service, such as Twitter or Facebook, as well as those that have been around for a long time, such as Instant Messaging or SMS. It is easier than ever to create, manage, and report on multi-channel services using Voxeo technology. See how to use VoiceObjects (Voxeo’s service creation, execution and reporting environment) as the front-end and IMified (Voxeo’s hosted texting platform) as the back-end to deliver self-service over SMS with unmatched ease of development and time to market.

It’s a great session… and when you are done watching and want to try it out yourself, you can download VoiceObjects for free and sign up for a free IMified account to create the kind of applications Tobias covers.

Watch for more webinars coming soon on more multi-channel topics!

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!

Ever since we started talking about creating “Unified Self-Service” applications, we have always talked about how our VoiceObjects product made creating such applications incredibly easy.  However, one challenge with VoiceObjects has been that you do need an on-premises server on which to deploy the VoiceObjects application.

That need for a server has been a barrier for many folks (including me, actually) looking to use VoiceObjects as a way to easily build applications.

Today we’re pleased to remove that barrier to entry with the release of VoiceObjects On-Demand, a new service from Voxeo where the VO servers actually live up in our hosted cloud infrastructure.  It’s simple to try it out… just go to:

www.voxeo.com/vo-ondemand

to learn more, download relevant white papers and get started!