Watson Assistant Uses AI to Drive Better Customer Engagement

While call center work has become more automated in recent years, there is still a strong need for live agents – with live human intelligence – to interact with customers, particularly for more complex transactions. This doesn’t mean, however, that there is no place for artificial intelligence (AI) to help make the calls go more quickly, with better resolution outcomes.

Last month, IBM (News - Alert) announced new updates to Watson Assistant, the company's intelligent virtual agent, to help businesses leverage AI and natural language processing (NLP) to address customer issues on first contact.  Watson Assistant is designed to provide customers with relevant answers more quickly over the phone, SMS, web, or any messaging platform, and seamlessly hand-off to a live agent when additional support is needed.

New features included the integration of the IntelePeer (News - Alert) Atmosphere Communications Platform-as-a-Service available as an add-on in Watson Assistant so that users can set up voice capabilities and a new phone number for a virtual agent quickly; Watson Assistant's Search Skill feature update to include short-answer retrieval, which is based on question-answering (QA) system from IBM Research; and a new agent app feature designed to help customer service agents pick up with a customer right where the virtual agent left off.

Increasingly, companies are using Watson Assistant to support call centers that are facing a rising number of inquiries related to the global COVID-19 pandemic. 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.

In response, 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 for the 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."

Edited by Luke Bellos

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