For customer self-service, access alone is not enough, an intuitive and easy to use interface is essential. There is no better user interface for customer self service than plain English. These channels enable customers to perform self-service in conversational English just as they would with live agents.

Making plain English conversation a reality is a state-of-the-art, patent pending component VISA - Virtual Intelligent  Service Agent.  VISA enables automated plain English conversations without live agent participation. Consequently this translates to significant labor cost reductions and better, more nimble customer service.

Virtual Intelligent  Service Agent is essentially a clone of a live agent, which possesses Natural Language Processing (NLP) capability and business knowledge provided by the knowledge base.

The NLP performs 2 functions:

• Natural Language Understanding (NLU) – understands what the user has said in the conversation context maintained by the Conversation Manager.
• Natural Language Synthesis (NLS) – generates responses in plain English according to the conversation context maintained by the Conversation Manager.

The "knowledge" of VISA resides the knowledge base where your institutional knowledge, methods, procedures, practices and business strategies reside.

Security

The larger and more diverse your customer base is the more potential for security risks.  IPlatform implements multi-level security. First, users are centrally authenticated and authorized to gain access. Secondly, each channel is protected through channel security. Additionally, security can be implemented at the user and/or group level. For example, company proprietary data can be withheld from external users such as CLECs.

Customization versus development

A comprehensive set of User Interfaces are provided for each channel. In most cases, once you have deployed an application, the application is instantly available to customers/users across all channels without development and programming for each user interface. For example, after a DSL service application is deployed to IPlatform, your customers can access the DSL service through voice over any telephone in conversational English.  Concurrently your customers could also be enabled to text or instant message their customer service issues.

The built in user interfaces for each channel can be customized by the subject matter experts (non-technical personnel).