SELF-SERVE APPLICATIONS - Cut out the middleman

Many companies believe that the only way to improve customer service is to throw more money at internal customer service systems, to make the customer service representatives more productive. In other words, you can improve customer service or cut costs, but not both at the same time.

Let others talk about thinking outside-the-box. VisionMAX enables you to extend customer service functionality in the box, out of the box, or wherever customers need it to be!

Why not empower the customer to do the inquiry or make the account changes herself? Companies that have opened up their back-office systems to customers have been able to:

• Improve customer satisfaction
• Slash costs by reducing the number of calls coming in to the Call Centre
• Reduce the number of errors introduced into the company's databases
• Speed up transactions and reduce time-to-market

So, if it makes so much sense to open up the back-office systems to customers, why are so few companies doing it?

A major roadblock for many companies is that they are operating multiple legacy green-screen systems that would be cumbersome or impossible for customers to navigate. Research and experience tells us that this concern is misplaced.

VisionMAX has used the VisionEngine platform to build secure self-serve applications for many clients using information scattered across several systems and scores of screens. VisionEngine enabled us to:

• Access information stored in various systems
• Create business rules that governed user interaction, and store them separately from the code
• Securely interact in a system with the option of doing so by several means – Web browser, PDA (BlackBerry, Palm), telephone interactive voice response, TV set-top box, cell phone text message