Supercomputer and gameshow champion Watson is being put to use in the call centre through a new partnership that will see IBM Watson’s technology used to improve customer service experiences.

The power of Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, is being tapped to improve the way brands engage clients across customer service, marketing and sales.

Customer experience and contact centre solution provider, Genesys has partnered with IBM to augment customer service agents. The agreement between IBM Watson and Genesys aims to develop a learning system that combines the Watson Engagement Advisor with the Genesys Customer Experience Platform. It will take advantage of IBM Watson’s natural language solution, which learns, adapts and understands market and organisational data quickly and easily, and gets progressively smarter with use, outcomes, and new pieces of information.

The IBM Watson and Genesys solution will aid and assist a brand’s customer service agents to provide fast, data-driven answers, or simply sit directly in the hands of consumers via mobile device, chat session or online interaction. In one simple click, the solution’s ‘Ask Watson’ feature can quickly help address customers’ questions, offer feedback to guide their purchase decisions, and troubleshoot their problems.

In joining the Watson Ecosystem, Genesys customers will gain access to a cloud-based advisor that can quickly read and uncover insights from millions of pages of content, including product guides and call transcripts. The result is that cognitive computing will augment service agents’ knowledge and free their bandwidth from searching for answers, to creatively thinking of how they can further help a customer or even make a sale.

Employees in a contact centre can gain access to a cloud-based Watson advisor that can read and uncover insights from millions of pages of data-driven content within seconds, from product guides to call transcripts. The result: cognitive computing that will augment a contact center agent’s knowledge and shift their time from searching for answers to discovering timely insights that solve problems, facilitate new opportunities, and improve the customer experience.

The partnership with Genesys follows IBM’s formation of the IBM Watson Group in January 2014, a business unit dedicated to the commercialisation of cloud-delivered cognitive technologies, in which Watson is focusing his attention on bringing the cognitive experience to the healthcare, finance, marketing and service industries.

Below is an illustration of Watson’s applications in customer experience, by IBM. Click the image to enlarge.