Self Care

For many years, even decades, we have been promised that technology will enable consumers to serve themselves using self-service applications on the web, smartphone or the IVR. This promise seems that has been fulfilled. Or has it? Do you feel that the web or IVR self-service that you are offering your customers is really a "service"? Or do your customers find themselves searching and filtering through vast information or numerous menu options to find a way to self-serve?

Today's Self Care applications need to deal with complex domains. Unfortunately, the approach they adopt to deal with this complexity leaves a lot to be desired: dump all the options and let the user filter through. In many cases, the "service" provided by such applications is no more than a list of knowledge-base documents that exhibit varied degrees of relevance to what the customer may have asked. Surely, no customer would put up with such level of service from a human-assisted customer service channel, such as the contact center. So why do customers put up with it? Perhaps they do not!

At Omilia we have been dealing, for quite some time now, with the nuances of Self-Service over the telephone channel, a.k.a. IVR self-service. IVR Self-Service is a particularly difficult task to do right. You have to work with a relatively restrictive audio-only channel, which means that presentation of information can only be linear. Therefore, one needs to be extremely careful and picky as to what the customer hears, and at the same time, the IVR must be able to handle all sorts of exceptions. To cope with the complexities of the User Interface, we employed Natural Language Understanding, and went even beyond to enable full cradle-to-grave Natural Dialog Interaction between system and user.

Understanding User Intent and optimizing the User eXperience is at the heart of our philosophy - and our technology.

"System-Assisted Service" is the design principle underpinning Omilia's Self Care solutions, offering the following unique features:

• "How may I help you?" approach, empowering the User to express their request in natural language
• No need for menus and options. The system understand the request and responds in a targeted manner
• Guides the User step-by-step to complete the service, similar to a human operator