Two years after Watson made its high profile debut on TV’s Jeopardy, IBM is making its “cognitive computing” resource available as a cloud-based service to support customer care. Big Blue introduced Watson Engagement Advisor at the SmarterCommerce Global Summit in Nashville, TN. At the same time, spokespeople noted that an impressive roster of companies were already gaining experience with the service through an early customer program (ECP). A partial list of participants includes RBC (Royal Bank of Canada), ANZ Bank (Australia), USAA, Verizon, Telstra, Allstate Insurance and Celcom Axiata Bhd (Kuala Lumpur).

The announcement includes an engagement model of its own. IBM expects companies to be able to have their Watson Engagement Advisor up and running within 6 weeks and that enterprise customers who put it to use can expect to reach their ROI goals within 6 months. That six week period is used to identify specific content and “Q&A Pairs” to give Watson a starting point in its cognitive journey. This information is uploaded electronically to a version of Watson in the cloud and becomes the basis for building initial “custom UIs” to handle the most commonly asked questions. The original information is augmented by accompanying documentation, such as product manuals or sales collateral in PDF format or information from the company’s Web pages (HTML).

When the information is loaded, a pilot begins among a subset of employees or customers. During the pilot, Watson is able to expand its vocabulary and build what amounts to a larger “grammar” of terms or questions that it understands. At the end of the 6 week period, IBM’s professional services personnel migrates the pilot into production mode, where use by the broader population will further improve its ability to understand and answer questions. Once it demonstrates that it can scale in production, enterprise implementers can begin to train the system on other domains or sets of “Q&A,” with the help of subject matter experts among company employees or customers.

The ECP started in March and has already shown results which IBM is showcasing at the SmarterCommerce Global Summit. It is showcasing the ability for a computer system to assist in customer engagement by enabling them to converse in “plain-English” dialogs. It uses past conversations and feedback to refine future answers, thus it improves over time. IBM’s value proposition is that this approach will deepen relationships with customers, leading to higher retention rates and (theoretically) enhanced revenue. At the very least, much like FAQs, automated handling of the questions that arise most often will reduce operating expenses associated with live reps in contact centers.

The new packaging and promotion by IBM feels like a simple way for enterprises to get started and get comfortable with virtual assistants. From this modest beginning we can see how enterprises can expand upon their offerings, making them a cornerstone to personalization and, eventially, morphing them from “assistants” to “advisors.” As a large, global provider of enterprise infrastructure software and middleware, IBM is in a great position to raise the profile of Personal Virtual Assistants (PVA). The IBM Watson imprimatur (though it can be confused with AT&T’s Watson platform) has good name recognition as well.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, IBM, Natural Language Understanding, personal virtual assistants