Watson saves every IBM support employee 45 minutes of work per day.
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IBM uses Watson, the artificially intelligent data analysis processor to scale technical support to thousands of customers in 170 countries. With the help of Watson, every tech professional in the IBM support center saves 45 minutes of work a day, said Joanna Dapkevich, vice president of IBM support tooling and Watson innovation.
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With more than 7,000 products, IBM technical support professionals struggled to help every customer with any technical issue related to an IBM device. Watson artificial intelligence (AI) helps organize and properly distribute this workload, Dapkevich said.
Wilson’s workload
Dapkevich outlined the following three ways in which Watson AI significantly improved operations in the IBM technical support center.
1. Ticket organization
There are 20,000 support agents in the IBM Technical Support Center. “They have a line of tickets somewhere between 40 and 60 when they come in. We shadowed the support agents and said,” Other than the seriousness, how do you approach this big list every day? ” And they said: “We have all read 40 to 60 and then we determine the order,” said Dapkevich.
Before Watson, technical professionals analyzed each ticket, assessing details such as when the last contact was made with the customer and the customer’s tone on the ticket. This process took each employee approximately 45 minutes, Dapkevich thought.
Dapkevich asked the technical professionals: “What if Watson can do all of that for you?” And yes, Watson did it, saving them 45 minutes of reading and organizing to work on real customer issues instead, Dapkevich said.
2. Ticket description
In addition to organizing and analyzing each ticket, Watson also creates prompts to help customers describe the ticket problem and then sends the ticket to the appropriate support agent, Dapkevich said.
By using cognitive routing to help clients make their case, tech professionals and clients see a time saving of 24% to 28%. “Before we applied these solutions, it took 10 days to resolve something. Now it can be done in seven days,” Dapkevich said.
Watson can read and organize the tickets because it is trained to recognize certain descriptive words. It has been trained on hundreds of thousands of tickets to understand key words that help Watson direct the ticket to the right person, Dapkevich said.
3. Chatbots
According to Dapkevich, one of the most advanced ways in which Watson helps technical support is via a chatbot on the support portal.
“If you are a customer, you would come to our support portal and Watson would be embedded throughout the life cycle with automation bots. Maybe you just want to reset a license key and instead of talking to a support agent, there is an automation bot who will reset it for you, “said Dapkevich. “It will be ready in seconds.”
“Instead of saddling a support agent who is highly technical and knowledgeable to do this everyday, repetitive type of work, the customer gets the answer faster with an advanced cognitive chatbot,” Dapkevich added.
How to offer scale support
Agility and pace, the key to successfully deploying a solution like this on a scale, according to Dapkevich.
“The biggest failures I’ve seen are people who have spent two or three years doing something very big, and then they learned that it didn’t deliver what they hoped for,” Dapkevich said.
Dapkevich also recommended that support staff be reminded that Watson does not replace employees, but acts as a team member and supports the human professional.
For more information, view IBM Watson Media releases of the mobile video streaming app on TechRepublic.
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