How IBM Watson Is Enabling The Powerful Omnichannel Customer Contact Center?

A Walker study suggested that CX or customer experience can overtake product and price as the key brand differentiator by 2020. Good customer service is no longer optional for companies to stay competitive. In 2022. It is all the more important when 80% of customers tend to switch to the competitor’s product after having >1 bad experience.

With the spotlight on CX now, it is imperative to move from traditional communication methods (phone, email) to innovative and interactive means (self-service assistance, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc.). As it happens, the digital customer of today also prefers an omnichannel existence.

This is where IBM Watson steps in with its vision to empower an omnichannel custom contact center.

This AI-powered solution helps build conversational interfaces across channels, devices, and applications. Much like human personal assistants, Watson assistants can search a knowledge base for answers, ask for further clarity, conduct conversations on phone calls or switch to text, and even direct to humans for more information.

Overcoming the biggest challenge of self-service assistance

While self-service assistance is now evolving as a new-age digital imperative, there is a huge challenge to its efficiency. For example – the self-service assistant may have difficulties pronouncing rows of alphanumeric speech like email address, home address, etc.

The easiest way is to transfer that particular call to a human agent to avoid any mistakes. However, the lack of staff due to the pandemic adds to the customer wait time. Additionally, most companies are aware of the exorbitant expense of managing a large customer contact center. These challenges, and the ultimate involvement of human agents, defy the purpose of implementing self-service assistance.

How does IBM Watson solve this challenge?

It’s natural to ask, what does IBM Watson do differently?

IBM Watson has recently incorporated a feature called ‘channel transfer.’ With this feature, companies can offer an alternative approach to their customers, so that they can easily shift the mode of communication as per the requirement. This is the omnichannel network solution that facilitates easy customer communication without raising the burden of phone calls with human agents.

Enabling an omnichannel customer contact center

Consider a situation: Your customer is most probably using a smartphone to contact your help desk. The customer is trying to change their default bank account and seeks customer service.

A generic self-service assistant can only assess the nature of the call and will eventually connect the call to a live agent, as several sensitive user information is involved.

Not with IBM Watson!

Maintaining the flow of conversation, IBM Watson can route the self-service assisted call to a webchat session where the customer can put in their new details, taking as much time as they need to be accurate.

Before routing, the self-service assistant will ask the customer if they want to shift to a webchat mode for convenience. When a customer wants to shift to webchat, the response type to the backend is called channel_transfer. The backend then verifies if SMS or any other channel is configured on the assistant.

Upon agreement, the assistant will send a text message to the customer with a link to the Watson Assistant webchat widget along with a session token query parameter. Clicking on this link can start a webchat right from the smartphone’s web browser. The customer can even hang up the call and continue with the resolution on webchat.

This is simply one example of how IBM Watson is utilizing an omnichannel approach to enhance the customer experience.

The self-service assistant is designed to complete every task most efficiently. It may involve not switching the channel at all, too. But, if need be, a channel transfer to web chat can access all built-in channel integrations like smartphone SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc. This way, customers can seek solutions to the most complex problems on platforms of their choice, developing great conversational flow and enhancing the overall CX. After all, a Forrester report shows that 83% of customers cite customer service as the most important criterion for choosing one company over the other.

Benefits of integrating IBM Watson

While improved customer experience is the most crucial benefit of integrating IBM Watson, it comes with plenty of other good deals, like:

• Reduced expense of running a full-fledged customer contact center
• Better productivity with low wait and hold time
• Offer resolution to customer issues right on the first call

By respecting your customer’s time and improving services, your company can benefit from customer loyalty and trust. But that’s not all!

• IBM Watson can become the centralized problem-solving engine that has an omnichannel presence to route issue resolution through the desired channel.
• Only a few lines of JSON code can program this omnichannel skill in a Watson Assistant, reducing hours spent on development.
• Quick support to provide automatically generated web links to the caller over SMS (when their number is configured).
• IBM Watson can funnel all complex queries to a single webchat channel as per the customer’s preference, establishing a conversational flow.

Is the future here now?

From world-class conversational AI to custom API integrations, self-service assistance has reached a new peak with IBM Watson. An ideal omnichannel customer contact center should have integration across channels to offer resolution through any medium their customer is comfortable with. IBM Watson is making it possible for companies, at inexpensive charges and low development requirements, making it a step forward to the future with excellent customer experience. Let us show you how the power of IBM Watson can elevate your customer service in the digital era.