In June 2014, Genesys and IBM formed a partnership which to insure that  IBM’s Watson’s “cognitive computing” capabilities are integrated with Genesys’ Customer Experience (CX) platform in ways that insure that Watson’s ability to learn and answer questions insure constant improvement in responding to customer inquiries. As readers of our posts know,  by promising to spend over $1 billion to establish an ecosystem for both partners and enterprise customers to leverage multiple years’ worth of investment in computer resources that serve (as we put it then) as a “grounded, funded, go-to resource for developing enterprise-based intelligent virtual assistants.”

In Genesys, IBM has found a partner whose CX Platform is pre-tooled to take advantage of Watson’s intent-recognition, decision making and recommendation capabilities. Conversation Manager is designed to keep track of the context of a call or Web chat as it changes channel and modality. Its closely mated Orchestration Server is a rules engine that enables companies to tailor routing instructions based on – in this case – IBM Watson’s understanding of a caller’s intent.

Watson’s natural language understanding (NLU) enables callers or Web chatters to use their own words to ask questions or make requests. Watson evaluates what the customer has said or typed based on its huge knowledge repository and may respond with an answer or decide to engage a live agent on the customer’s behalf by inviting the agent to join the Web chat or by routing a voice call to the agent, along with a transcript of the chat session.

IBM has been a go-to-market partner for Genesys for a number of years, playing the role of system integrator and providing professional services, among other things. This is not an “exclusive” partnership for either party. Nonetheless, it reflects a formal agreement for IBM and Genesys to market Watson as an Enterprise Intelligent Assistant where it leverages the capabilities of the CX Platform.

Functionally, Watson will provide a natural language interface, or front-end, that leverages the Genesys CX platform. It can interpret the intent of the customer, resolve issues as pure “self-service” or trigger a number of actions that are taken by the Genesys CX platform and its various elements, including the Agent Desktop, core Interaction Manager and Conversation Manager. Genesys presents it to prospects as CX “powered by Watson.” As such, part of Watson’s responsibility is to determine how much human involvement, or intervention, is required to answer a question or resolve an issue.

Opus Research expects the partnership to give enterprises in a number of verticals – starting with financial services, healthcare and pharma – to evaluate how a branded Intelligent Assistant could change their customer care and self-service strategies. Many large companies are just starting to determine how they should address the challenges of bringing “Big Data and Analytics” into the self-service and agent assistance workflows. Watson can understand and answer many of those challenges.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: IBM Watson, Genesys, Natural Language Understanding, mobile customer experience, intelligent Assistants