IBM Watson Engagement Advisor

IBM Watson Engagement Advisor Transforming the way customers and organizations engage

July 2015

2 IBM Watson Engagement Advisor

Introduction Organizations across industries face higher expectations than ever from their customers. Shifting demographics, changing social patterns, and the proliferation of mobile technology have redefined the rules of engagement and individuals now drive the relationship. A number of themes have emerged that are indicative of the radically different nature of the relationship between today’s firms and their customers. Firstly, customers expect all interactions to be seamless, painless and efficient. The millennial generation in particular has very high demands of service delivered in the digital domain and has little loyalty to brands that under-deliver. Secondly, customers increasingly want the ability to self-serve. In an ideal scenario, customers want to be able to achieve their goal (to change their flight or to ask technical support questions for example) online and without human assistance. In a recent study, 72% of customers surveyed prefer to serve themselves rather than engage with a live agent1. Furthermore, people are increasingly on the go and accessing company services from mobile devices is common-place. They’re sharing more insights about themselves through surveys, registrations and the 2.5B active accounts on the top three social media platforms alone2.

These forces change how customers wish to engage, interact, and structure relationships with organizations. Fully engaged customers deliver a 23% premium in share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth3. But despite these many opportunities, most organizations are not taking advantage of today’s unprecedented customer access and availability of data to meet the changing needs for engagement. Many firms continue to rely heavily on traditional contact centers to engage customers. Half of calls typically go unresolved or require escalation4. Yet, 61% of the time, the failed calls (which inevitably erode customer satisfaction) could have been resolved with better access to information4. Meanwhile, a single point change in customer satisfaction corresponds to a 4.6% change in market value5. Organizations need a new approach.

A one-point change in customer satisfaction is associated with a 4.6% change in market value


IBM Watson Engagement Advisor IBM Watson Engagement Advisor has the potential to transform the way people and companies interact over the lifetime of their relationships. The cognitive capabilities of Watson can allow firms to build the sort of digital self-service experience that their customers expect. Watson employs a unique combination of cognitive services including natural language processing, machine learning and dialog. This combination of cognitive technologies can permit a very natural self-service experience. It can help companies to take the best customer service practices and replicate them, making them available to all of your customers, all of the time. In effect, Watson is digitally scaling and enhancing your best customer service agents.

A transformed experience At the heart of the Watson self-service experience is the ability to interact with Watson in plain conversational English. Ask Watson a question and it will attempt to respond with the correct answer. There are many different sorts of questions, each requiring a different approach to answering it. For example, these are just three different types of questions: Procedural: How do I file a tax return? Definition: What is Black Friday? Factoid: What is the shipping cost to Arizona? Trouble-shooting: I’ve forgotten my password The intent behind this last example (I’ve forgotten my password) is that the customer requires help to reset it. In this instance, Watson is able to walk the customer through a relevant steps of a process to help the customer to realize their aim.

Engage customers by scaling your best agents


Watson Everywhere Watson Engagement Advisor can help meet growing expectations that today customers engage with organizations wherever, whenever, and however they choose. In today’s omni-channel world, customers expect the same, high quality experience whether they access the solution from a computer, smartphone or from a myriad of other devices. Watson is omni-channel by nature and is intended to be accessible wherever and whenever it is required. Additionally, Watson can be as unobtrusive as you wish it to be; it can be desirable for Watson to be subtly integrated into an existing web presence or mobile app. Watson can also extend to beyond the purely digital domain; sometimes Watson benefits from having a physical presence such as a robot or hologram. In this instance, the device acts as a customer interaction point in an airport or hotel lobby, for example.

Transforming the way people and companies

interact over the lifetime of their relationships

Figure 1: Sample interaction on a smartphone

The opportunities to expand your presence and facilitate engagement with your brand - wherever your customers may be - are limitless. This distributed self-service experience can transform the way that people and companies interact over the lifetime of their relationships.

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A new approach to engagement The era of cognitive systems is dawning and building on today’s programmatic computing era. Once-futuristic capabilities are becoming mainstream. Natural language interaction will make user experiences more intuitive and help extract knowledge and insight from data. Machine learning will help systems improve with usage and evolve with expanding information and changing user needs.

Built for business Watson Engagement Advisor is designed to scale with your business and built to integrate with existing systems, complement existing processes, and guide users through a consistent user experience. Watson is available as a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform; it scales with your business on a usage basis – driving value not overhead.

Designed for scalability

6 IBM Watson: Engagement Advisor

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2015 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 Produced in the United States of America July 2015 IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and IBM Watson are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. The performance data and customer examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. Please Recycle

Sources: 1-‐ “Selec.ng Online Customer Service Channels To Sa.sfy Customers And

Reduce Costs”, Forrester Research Inc., June 25, 2010 2 – Digital Marke.ng Ramblings

hMp://expandedramblings.com/index.php/resource-‐how-‐many-‐people-‐use-‐the-‐top-‐social-‐media/

3 – Crea.ng Impact in B2B Rela.onships, by Ed O'Boyle and Craig Kamins, Gallup Business Journal, March 27, 2012

4– Aberdeen Group. The Contact Center in a Profit-‐centric Service Organiza.on May 2011

5 – Journal of Marke.ng, January 2006; Customer Sa.sfac.on and Stock; Prices: High Returns, Low Risk; Claes Fornell, Sunil Mithas, Forrest V. Morgeson III, & M.S. Krishnan

IBM Watson Engagement Advisor

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