Watson has a new job. IBM’s supercomputer Watson will now, after defeating two seasoned competitors in the popular American quiz Jeopardy and being employed in healthcare to assist in diagnosing health issues, help companies better understand their customers.
Watson Engagement Advisor is, announced at the IBM Smarter Commerce conference in Nashville, the latest technology that enables companies to leverage ‘big data’ and transform the way they engage customers in key functions such as marketing, sales, and customer service in record time.
Companies can now, they say at IBM, better respond to customer needs with the help of a cognitive computing assistant that learns, adapts, and understands the data available to the respective company incomparably faster and easier than before. The result should be deep insights into customer preferences, desires, and needs.
– Understanding customers is a natural environment for Watson as it can instantly create strong connections between who the customers are as individuals and what type of information will help them achieve their goals – said Manoj Saxena, IBM’s Senior Vice President for Watson Solutions.
The Watson assistant will be available as a cloud service through online chat, email, smartphone applications, etc., and should enable customer service agents to provide quick responses based on the data they have. The Ask Watson option can, they say at IBM, quickly respond to customer inquiries and offer feedback and resolve issues. Watson’s advantage is its ability to understand nuances in human language (currently only English), the process of human thinking and questioning, and quickly selecting the right answer from a vast amount of data and information. Moreover, Watson learns, so each subsequent time its performance should be better, and the response more personalized.
