Unified Self Service

A large amount of contact center inbound traffic is related to information queries or simple interactions that involve few steps. This kind of traffic can be often served by using self-service solutions, automated procedures that do not involve human intervention from the part of the company. Self service is an extremely efficient addition to contact centers, since the cost of an automated interaction can be around five times cheaper than using live agents.

Self-service technology can be implemented on a variety of contact center channels. Web-based self-service is the most common and usually easiest to implement and use. A visual web interface is very robust and intuitive, and large amounts of possible interactions can be offered in a small amount of pages. Forms are easy to use and the http request-reply model fits extremely well to the self service model. The only problem web interfaces have is that they require a computer and internet connection, which is not always available or convenient to have.

Therefore, in the context of enhancing contact centers with additional channels, many companies opt to integrate self-service options for additional communication methods which are more readily available on the move. From all non web-based self service methods, the most commonly used is telephone self-service, powered by IVR systems. A Voice User Interface (VUI) is typically developed to guide the users through layered menus, until they retrieve the information they need. Traditional VUI using DTMF inputs only is rather inflexible for large scale systems and menus. The introduction of speech-enabled IVRs that came along with the significant breakthroughs in speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies has alleviated this issue a lot (the quality of speech technologies is still heavily dependent on the language itself – a lot more money and effort is naturally invested in English language than, for example, in Greek). The users can now speak a specific keyword and be instantly directed to the appropriate submenu, skipping all the intermediate steps and getting the information they need quickly. Well designed VUIs can be very intuitive to use and it is probably the best option to use when web interfaces are not available. An option to transfer to a live agent also helps a lot, in case the users encounter problems with the automated systems.

SMS is another convenient channel for self-service that is widely used. It is especially convenient for 1-step queries. The user can send a text message to a number, using predefined formatting to pass through some information about his query. The query is then processed on the server side and the results are returned back to the user via SMS.

The different communication channels can be integrated above a common database, to provide information independent of the channel being used.