ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE:
IBM) today announced the launch of new AI and automation
capabilities in IBM Watson Assistant designed to make it easier for
businesses to create enhanced customer service experiences across
any channel – phone, web, SMS and any messaging platform. This
includes a new collaboration with IntelePeer, a leading
Communications Platform-as-a-Service provider, to set up and test a
voice agent, and a new agent app designed to enable a seamless
hand-off to a live agent while maintaining the conversation's
context.
Virtual assistants are gaining popularity due to ongoing
improvements in natural language processing (NLP) and automation.
According to IBM's 2021 Global AI Adoption Index1, 52
percent of global IT professionals surveyed report that their
company is using or considering NLP solutions to improve customer
experiences.
IBM is adding new features in Watson Assistant, the company's
intelligent virtual agent, to help businesses leverage AI and NLP
to address customer issues on first contact. Watson Assistant
is designed to more quickly provide customers with relevant answers
over the phone, SMS, web, or any messaging platform, and seamlessly
hand-off to a live agent when additional support is needed. The new
features include:
- Add voice capabilities to Watson Assistant: The
IntelePeer Atmosphere Communications Platform-as-a-Service is now
available as an add-on in Watson Assistant so that users with a
Plus and Enterprise plan can set up voice capabilities and a new
phone number for a virtual agent quickly. If businesses already
have an existing contact center phone system, IntelePeer can also
provide the connection between Watson Assistant and the existing
phone system using industry standards. Using IntelePeer, Watson
Assistant is now designed to connect to nearly every major contact
center platform that uses the SIP protocol in as little as half an
hour with no coding.
- Help customers resolve issues on first contact with Watson
Assistant Search Skill: Watson Assistant's Search Skill feature
now includes short-answer retrieval, which is based on an
innovative question-answering (QA) system from IBM Research. This
enables the virtual agent to return an answer — in a few words —
from longer sentences or passages and provide the context on where
the answer came from. FAQ extraction is also now generally
available in Search Skill. FAQ extraction is designed to help
administrators keep the virtual agent up to date with broader
sources of information, without having to constantly make manual
updates.
- Facilitate a seamless hand-off with the new agent app:
Watson Assistant's new agent app feature is designed to help
customer service agents pick up with a customer right where the
virtual agent left off. When a customer calls in, IBM's speech
detection models, which are designed to provide more accurate
transcriptions out-of-the-box, deliver a near real-time
transcription of the conversation. When the hand-off occurs, the
new agent app provides the customer service agent with the latest
transcript right on their screen. This means customers don't have
to repeat their questions and agents are empowered to resolve
issues even more quickly.
"One critical challenge facing nearly every business today is
the need to better communicate with their customers and employees
across all channels," said Daniel
Hernandez, General Manager of Data and AI, IBM. "We're
continuously delivering new innovations in natural language
processing, automation and advancing responsible AI, and building a
strong, open ecosystem with partners like IntelePeer to help
businesses transform customer care with Watson Assistant."
State of Rhode Island Adopted IBM Watson Assistant to
Transform its Contact Center
In addition to the new
features announced today, IBM also announced that organizations of
all sizes have turned to Watson Assistant to help them address
customer problems in the face of rising call volumes.
For example, when new COVID-19 cases began to surge last year,
the State of Rhode Island realized
fielding hundreds of thousands of calls from concerned residents
was unsustainable. The State needed to improve its engagement with
residents with more efficient processes and timely updates to
rapidly changing COVID information.
To address untenable workloads, the State turned to Watson
Assistant to address the engagement processes with residents and to
improve the support with the contact center. IBM Global Business
Services (GBS) and the State of Rhode
Island launched a virtual agent, "RHODA," that uses Watson
Assistant to answer questions about COVID-19 in both English and
Spanish. Since October 2020, RHODA
has had more than 100,000 conversations on topics related to test
scheduling, test results, travel restrictions, and vaccine
eligibility. In addition, IBM GBS integrated Watson Assistant into
the IVR for Vaccine Appointment Scheduling to help enable an
improved experience for individuals that needed assistance with
appointment scheduling.
"The pandemic slammed my team at the State of Rhode Island
Department of Health and we quickly realized that our outdated
systems and smaller call centers were completely unequipped to
handle the influx of phone calls from concerned citizens, forcing
us to pull staff from all directions within the department," said
Kristine Campagna, COO of COVID
Operations, Rhode Island Department of Health. "With IBM's wealth
of experience in AI, we were able to work together to seamlessly
integrate Watson Assistant into our call centers, helping us
provide thousands of citizens in a matter of days with information
about COVID-19."
Learn more about Watson Assistant and the new features announced
today, by reading the IBM Watson blog, IntelePeer blog, or
visiting: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watson-assistant
1 Morning Consult on behalf of IBM: "Global AI
Adoption Index 2021" (May 2021)
Media Contact:
Sarah
Murphy
IBM Media Relations
srmurphy@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM