IBM Watson

Assistant
Go beyond chat.
Deliver actions and answers.

Highlights Your customers don’t want to chat. They want answers and action.
Conversational AI In today’s omnichannel customer service environment, experience is everything—
for customer care so much that 91% of unsatisfied customers will part ways with a brand.1

Automate inquiries Not only is a great customer experience mandatory to stay competitive—more
across any channel than half of organizations consider it to be a primary differentiator2—but
expectations are growing. Your customers now expect more personalized
Ensure security experiences, automated self-support and exceptional customer care.
and data ownership
Building the ideal customer experience is not just about delighting them—it’s
Powerful AI about eliminating friction and helping them reach their goals in the fewest number
of steps. But with 74% of customers using multiple channels to engage with and
Integrations to meet complete transactions3, many organizations struggle to a consistent experience
your needs across all touch points. In fact, since 2020, call centers have seen a 38% increase
in hold times and 68% more escalations.4
No-code user interface
Your organization needs to create, automate and deliver an omnichannel
Enterprise-ready experience that meets customers’ expectations no matter where they interact.

This is where the power of AI comes in.

IBM® Watson® Assistant provides customers with fast, straightforward and

accurate answers to their questions, across any application, device or channel.
Watson Assistant is a platform built for business users, so your teams can design,
deploy and manage conversational AI using the same framework—and without
needing a data scientist to do it.
Powerful AI In a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study, 99% of respondents reported
improving customer satisfaction by using AI-enabled virtual agents, while 96%
reported meeting or exceeding return on investment.5

While that sounds simple enough, in reality the varied needs of your customer
base make implementing a solution incredibly complex. Most chatbots fall
down when attempting to understand your customers’ distinct goals and
intentions, as well as differences in how they communicate them.

But Watson Assistant is different. Watson is designed to learn as it goes, improving

automatically over time by gaining knowledge from every conversation, through
a process called autolearning. Watson surfaces the most relevant responses to
customer queries, improving its capabilities with no human supervision.

Watson Assistant understands your customers

Reduce friction and streamline conversations by deploying AI virtual agents
with powerful natural language understanding.

Designed to accurately recognize what users want, Watson Assistant comes out-
of-the-box with the latest NLP techniques. Watson understands the flow of natural
language, so you can build robust assistants that understand natural conversations.

It can learn the vocabulary of your industry and even internal terminology unique
to your organization. You can also customize Watson to understand nuances like
regional dialects and colloquialisms.

Leading the industry in AI research

Watson Assistant benefits from the integration of constant breakthroughs at the
forefront of artificial intelligence by IBM’s leading AI research and development
teams. Aiming to increase precision, decrease the amount of training data,
and shorten the time to production, this continual investment in research and
innovation positions Watson Assistant to be the heart of any organization’s
customer service operation.

For example, a recently published benchmark shows that the accuracy of

Watson Assistant’s latest intent detection algorithm, which is more accurate
versus commercial and open-source solutions6 (see Table) is 79%, up from
76.3% in the immediately previous version.

Full average Subset average

Average
IBM Watson Assistant 73.8 70.5 72.2
Google Dialogflow 69.2 64.0 66.6
Microsoft LUIS 59.9 54.6 57.5
Haptik 73 67.6 70.3
RASA 67.4 58.4 62.9
BERT 71.9 64.1 68.0

This means a Watson Assistant virtual agent can answer customer help requests
much more often on its own without human agent involvement, which can save
money and increase user satisfaction.

2 IBM Watson Assistant

Seamless usability, no data Unlike other AI technologies geared only to data scientists and developers,
Watson Assistant has been designed so that virtually anyone can create, modify
science degree needed and maintain a highly intelligent, AI-powered virtual assistant without having
to rely on IT teams.

This usability means that you can support your organization’s short and long-term
goals with capabilities that not only allow you to get started quickly but can also
improve and expand over time.

“We found Watson Assistant to be Easy to build

easy to use and very scalable. The Launch a highly intelligent AI-powered web client on your site in minutes by
eliminating the need for technical development. Watson Assistant lets your
interface allows anyone to create non-technical users build, train and maintain advanced chatbots without
a chatbot, while also enabling our writing a line of code.
developers to leverage the full
Intuitive interface
power of Watson.” A simple drag-and-drop dialog builder helps users design conversations based on
Joan Francy how a customer would discuss an issue. Watson Assistant also includes predefined
CEO content packages for common use cases, including financial services, telecom,
AdMed retail, customer service and more.

Customize your chatbot to fit your brand and embed it in your website
with a simple copy and paste.

Most importantly, Watson Assistant provides users with a robust analytics

dashboard, enabling them to spot trends, understand points of friction, and take
immediate actions to improve how their assistants operate. You’ll be able to
automatically track the most common customer frustrations, before and during
interactions, then use that data to reduce call times and allocate resources more
efficiently and effectively.

Seamless integration The modern customer service experience isn’t limited to a single conversation.
It spans a holistic ecosystem that includes customer service representatives,
back-end business processes and systems, and an ever-growing array of third-
party applications. Watson is designed to plug into this ecosystem, integrating
with your front-end and back-end platforms and tools to make the entire
customer service experience smarter and simpler from start to finish. This makes
your customers’ interactions with your business feel more like a meaningful
relationship with someone who genuinely cares, and less like a series of random,
fragmented conversations with strangers.

Extendable
Watson Assistant connects to your existing customer care and other external
applications, sites, or systems (it’s built with native integration with leading call
center solutions), with many other custom integrations available through open APIs.

3 IBM Watson Assistant

Seamless integration Key integrations include
– Advanced voice agent
– Facebook Messenger
– Genesys
– Salesforce
– Slack
– SMS
– Webchat widget
– WhatsApp
– Zendesk

Don’t just chat

You need AI that can accurately identify what a customer is trying to accomplish,
especially when the intent is unclear.

The artificial intelligence at the core of Watson Assistant is designed to recognize

plain language responses and identify the countless permutations of intent in real-
world omnichannel interactions, extracting the insight it needs to provide accurate
and complete answers.

By connecting to existing content sources and automating responses to both

common and complex customer inquiries from day one, Watson Assistant frees
your agents to focus on more complex issues—not repetitive questions.

For example, customers can start a conversation on one topic, then ask an
unrelated question, then return to the original thread. Watson Assistant can
manage these different topics, respond to the off-topic question, and be able
to return to the original topic.

Watson Assistant also reduces frustration by asking customers for context when they
provide ambiguous statements, rather than making them continuously rephrase the
question. If the customer intention still isn’t clear, Watson Assistant provides them
with some suggestions, and if it’s unable to resolve a particularly complex customer
issue, can seamlessly pass the customer to a human agent, right in the same channel.

Watson Assistant uses a single conversational platform across voice, messaging,

and digital channels and automatically adapts to your domain, so you can simplify
the experience for your customers as well as your agents.

Gets smarter over time

Instead of building all your conversations from scratch, Watson Assistant uses
machine learning to mine your existing conversation transcripts and chatlogs
for recurring topics. It then suggests which ones to use for training, using the
previously answered questions to create new intents, automating its handling
of the topic when it comes up again.

4 IBM Watson Assistant

Trust in IBM’s enterprise- In addition to market leading technology, IBM maintains leadership in experience,
expertise and research in artificial intelligence, so that your investment is backed
ready solutions by continual innovation and support.

Need help getting started?

Whether you are looking for expert guidance or engagement to help you get
started quickly or more help to do a complete transformation, we have the
teams ready to help you no matter where you are on your journey.

The IBM Experts Labs is a team of 2,500+ deep product experts available
worldwide whose primary focus is to ensure that customers are getting the most
out of their IBM technology while achieving a high return on their investment.

They provide:

– Accelerated delivery
– Cost-effectiveness
– Prescriptive approach
– Proven methods
– Leverage existing investments

Learn more about Expert Labs →

Protect your data and your network

Watson Assistant has the security and scalability you need to safeguard against
misuse of customer data and support your virtual agent during peak times.

Maintain ownership over your data with available data isolation, mutual
authentication, and data privacy by default. Feel confident that IBM has the
network, physical and application security you need, from encrypting data
at rest to controlling who can access it.

High availability and disaster recovery

Sometimes it’s not hackers that cause a data loss, but inevitable technical failures.
Watson Assistant provides continuous service to your customers no matter what,
with enterprise-grade availability and no single point of failure.

Compliance and certifications

Complying with government and industry regulations is just as important
as protecting data from malicious actors and technical hiccups. Fulfill your
compliance and governance obligations with a solution that is ISO 27001,
27017, and 27018 certified and supports both GDPR and HIPAA compliance.

Lives on any cloud

Capitalize on deployment flexibility as your needs change.

Watson deploys on any public cloud—IBM, Amazon, Google or Microsoft­—your own

private cloud or on-premises with IBM Cloud Pak® for Data with the ability to move
to a different deployment with Red Hat® OpenShift®.

5 IBM Watson Assistant

 337% Pays for itself →
Less than 6 months for payback
on investment and delivers
337% in ROI according to
Forrester TEI report.

14.7% More accurate →

Proven up to 14.7% more
accurate than competitive
solutions in a recent published
study on machine learning.

1,000+ Trusted →
Proven a trusted and reliable
partner with over 1,000 client
deployments across every
industry.

Where to go next Now that you understand the value of AI to serve your customers, it’s time to
take the next step. Learn about how organizations like yours have used Watson
Assistant to enhance their customer experience at ibm.com/watsonassistant.

If you’re ready to create your own success story, discover how Watson Assistant
can empower your customer service organization.

Start a free trial →

Ask an expert →
Get the Gartner report →

Notes
1. Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right, PwC,
2018
2. “2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking
Report,” NTT, 2020
3. “200+ Research-Based Customer Service Statistics
[2022],” Tidio, May 2022
4. Supporting Customer Service Through the Coronavirus
Crisis, Harvard Business Review, April 8, 2020
5. The value of virtual agent technology, IBM Institute for
Business Value, May 2, 2021
6. Benchmarking Commercial Intent Detection Services
with Practice-Driven Evaluations, MIT- IBM Watson AI
Lab, June 2, 2021

6 IBM Watson Assistant

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2022 IBM, IBM Watson, IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Pak, the IBM logo and ibm.com are trademarks
IBM Corporation of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide.
Watson Assistant Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies.
Route 100 A current list of IBM trademark is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark
Somers, NY 10589 information” at www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.
Produced in the United
States of America Red Hat OpenShift is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc.
June 2022
Genesys Customer Driven HCM® is a registered trademark of Kenexa, an IBM Company.

Microsoft is a trademark of Microsoft in the United States, other countries, or both.

This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by
IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.

THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-
INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions
of the agreements under which they are provided.