IBM’s Watson BRINGS Cognitive Computing TO CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
By Klie, Leonard | |
Proquest LLC |
While the technology is still new, early developments are piquing interest in its future potential By
Not surprisingly, businesses took notice and in
A key tool of the Watson Engagement Advisor is Ask Watson, which lets customers speak directly to the technology through instant message, text message, email, Web chat, or a dedicated app on their mobile phones.
At
For ANZ, Watson will be used to help customers with insurance plans, telling them where they might have too much coverage or not enough, based on an analysis of their policies. It also will be helping investment counselors tailor their offerings based on specific customer needs.
The other early adopters were Malaysian telecommunications provider Celcom,
Analysts have also been impressed with Watson. Because Watson can listen and respond to a series of questions-including follow-up questions-and remember and learn from previous questions that were posed,
Watson's Hurdles
Despite this recognition, the technology still has several hurdles to overcome. Currently, the Watson Engagement Advisor remains untested by a broad consumer audience, and reviews are mixed as to whether it's up to the customer service challenge, especially given its limited speech capabilities.
"IBM Watson is a revolutionary natural language understanding engine with sophisticated abilities for processing language and learning from existing texts," notes
Technology writer and futurist
Nonetheless, Miller is confident in
That is where Watson truly shines. W atson proved on Jeopardy! that it has a unique ability to understand the nuances of human language, process questions asked in a format that mirrors the way people think, and quickly cull through vast amounts of data for relevant, evidence-based responses to questions thrown at it. The beauty of Watson,
Consumers can interact with Watson in plain English, directly or through an agent, to get personalized responses to questions and receive valuable insight with supporting evidence and a confidence score. The integrated Ask Watson feature greets and offers help to customers via a Web site chat window or a mobile push alert. "Speech recognition is just a shell for Watson," Miller says, "because the power of the Watson platform revolves around deep domain knowledge with natural language processing and machine learning."
Watson, in its current form, "is basically a way to get at the implications of big data,"
"An organization might have a number of text-based resources with information that might provide an answer to a customer's questions. Watson analyzes this body of data and converts it into answers accessible by natural language inquiries," Meisel explained. "The focus is inquiries by text...although any speech-to-text engine could create a text entry in theory."
But for Watson to truly succeed in the customer service role, it will need to be expanded with the ability to carry on a conversation, Dahl says. The current Watson Engagement Advisor lacks the ability to collaborate with the customer on resolving an issue, taking an order, helping shop for a product, or troubleshooting a problem, she states. "In those kinds of situations, Watson will need to be able to proactively ask questions," she says. "Right now, Watson's focused on in-depth answers to specific, one-off questions that don't relate to each other."
Also critical to Watson's success as a customer service tool will be its ability to link to other systems and data sources. Dahl says developers will need to be able to connect Watson's language understanding abilities to business rules and enterprise-level structured information. "This," she points out, "will allow Watson to do things like find and talk about customer-specific data, including addresses, purchase history, and preferred-customer status."
Eventually,
Developing with Watson
Since Watson's appearance on Jeopardy!,
Additionally,
Other industries finding uses for the Watson computing platform have included the medical field, with
In the insurance sector,
For other organizations looking to leverage Watson's capabilities,
Fluid, an Internet start-up that helps brands develop personalized shopping experiences, later this year hopes to release the Expert Personal Shopper (XPS) app powered by IBM Watson to offer consumers assistance in their purchase decisions. The app is expected to draw data from underlying sources, such as product information, customer loyalty data, sales histories, user reviews, blogs, and relevant magazines and other publications, to give users a highly enriched and personalized shopping experience. Fluid XPS, which the company hopes will be able to accept voice or text inputs, will be able to have conversations with customers and then recommend clothing based on their tastes.
Fluid has been experimenting with a prototype of the XPS app for The North Face. Called the Compass Gear Advisor, the app acts like an experienced in-store salesperson to help customers find the right coat or outdoor apparel for their particular needs.
MD Buyline, a
Showing its commitment to the development community, in early January,
Looking Ahead
"The current technology already handles all types of queries that customers of an enterprise ask of the enterprise," the
Dahl is optimistic about the future of
"
"Watson will need to be able to proactively ask questions."
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