BANGALORE, INDIA: IP has become the standard for new unified communications deployments today, and organizations having older TDM equipment and networks are migrating to IP at a very rapid rate.

This convergence on IP has also brought significant changes in customer care. Customer contact is no longer restricted just to ‘call centers’ and can now occur across the entire IP services landscape.

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Self-service applications play a vital role within such a framework, and allow organizations to harness the power of IP to provide speech- and video-enabled self-service in ways not possible before.

This includes deployments that are simply ‘services’ in the network.

The classic approach
Classic deployment models for enterprise self-service systems include interactive-voice-response (IVR) ports in one or more data centers.

Typically, a caller seeking customer care dials a toll-free number and the call is routed through the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to a self-service system in the data centre. The caller then performs some amount of self-service and either hangs up (hopefully satisfied with the self-service) or is routed to live assistance.

Interestingly, this classic self-service data-center deployment model is not tied solely to TDM architectures and is often used on IP networks. 

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this scenario and it works especially well in cases where the self-service system is located with or near live assistance at a contact centre.

However, this model begins to break down in scenarios where subsequent live assistance may be required at multiple, distributed sites such as retail store locations, branch offices, or dispersed automatic call distributors (ACDs).

In such cases it makes no sense for callers to be routed to a distant self-service system and be subsequently routed back to a local branch office or to a different ACD site. 

One way to address the problem of inefficient routing is placing a traditional IVR self-service system at each branch-office location or ACD site. Doing that, however, introduces significant expenses and new challenges of maintaining and updating the self-service applications at all the sites (which may number in the hundreds or thousands).

Alternatevely deploying self-service in the IP network offers a better way to provide improved customer care, while also saving costs.

Specifically, self-service can be delivered through browsers deployed at many locations, under the central control of one or more application servers located in a data centre (or at any convenient site).