A Visual Knowledge Publisher (VKP) system provides a graphical user interface environment that acts as a development platform for authoring predetermined dialog text for servicing various customer products and services and a Customer Interaction Platform for managing the interactions between the customer and the system. The VKP creates and outputs an XML document, using a Support Incident Markup Language (SIML). Each SIML document contains the procedural flows of the system's interactions with a human and the presentation elements of those interactions that are necessary to resolve the problem, often by a variety of methods. In this manner using a SIML document as input, voice and website dialogs may be defined a priori for various common problems. These dialogs allow a caller to interactively step through a procedure to resolve the problem using multiple channels (such as phone, web and PDA).