The CS Self-Service application provides a consolidated platform for the creation and configuration of multiple self-service channels, such as Web Chatbot and Unified Messaging in a single application. If you want to use chatbots to automatically handle your initial customer interaction by providing the contextual, bot-driven guidance to customers, you must create your customer self-service application on top of the CSSelf-Service application and your implementation layer of the Pega Customer Service application. Your self-service application leverages the service cases from your Pega Customer Service and the self-service capabilities such as bot configurations, conversational flows, and chat window configurations from the Pega CS Self-Service application. The Self-Service application focuses on helping your customer by providing the correct information and guiding them to take appropriate action. This approach reduces the number of escalations to live agents and if an escalation happens, it will be more focused. You can deploy the Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant on your website or messaging channels.

The following figure shows the application stack of your self-service application. It inherits features from each layer.

Application	Users	Description	Components
Your Pega Customer Service application	Contact center users such as CSRs and customer service managers	Your contact center users such as the CSRs and the contact center managers process the service cases and get role-based access to various features in the interaction portal, which is a part of your Pega Customer Service application.	Case type rules using best practices for the stages Parallel flows for the chat and messaging channels Flows including flow action assignments Flow sections
Your CS Self-Service application	End-users who interact with the chatbot on your website	End users process the service cases from the self-service application using a conversational UI (question and answers) in the web chatbot. Both the interaction portal in your Pega Customer Service application and your self-service application can support the same service cases with a difference in presentation. Self-service application supports a slimmed down UI with only question and answers.	Web chatbot channel configuration Flows using only the conversational shapes Trimmed down version of the Flow sections

• Creating a new ruleset for the self-service application
• Building a self-service application
• Creating access groups for self-service applications
• Adding case types and work pools
• Web self-service
• Configuring the Web Chatbot