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Deliver an exceptional customer care experience through a cognitive virtual assistant like Watson Assistant.
December 08, 2022

Deliver an exceptional customer care experience through a cognitive virtual assistant like Watson Assistant.

ANIS BIDHANI | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Watson Assistant

IBM Watson Assistant has helped us create intuitive and cognitive assistants to help address major business problems, including self-service, allowing our customers to answer over 50% of questions they have by themselves and through virtual assistants. Another business problem IBM Watson Assistant helped us with is reducing the number of phone calls received from clients asking repetitive questions or having access issues and similar simple tasks, which we automated within Watson Assistants thanks to the Advanced Actions feature. This helped our agents to free up over 40% of their time to tackle more complicated issues and deliver a quality service by knowing about the clients' issues before the calls were handed off to them by Watson Assistant in case the assistant failed to answer clients' questions.
  • IBM Watson Assistant helps create virtual assistants in a matter of hours or days, depending on how simple or complex your workflows are.
  • IBM Watson Assistant has a great feature called "Actions" that allows technical and business users alike to create simple and advanced actions to help them create workflows to answer questions that clients might have with the option to regress back even when interrupted by other questions in the middle of the workflow in progress.
  • IBM Watson Assistant integrates nicely with several extensions, including not only Watson Discovery to benefit from the SearchSkill feature but also with a custom search using OpenAPI to allow for the assistant to answer questions from other data sources or the Internet in general.
  • Watson Assistant requires some improvement in the way it deals with multimedia content when displayed on the assistant. As of now, IBM Watson Assistant has issues displaying technical diagrams on a small chat window. This is definitely something that needs some improvement.
  • It is sometimes hard and time-consuming to create some advanced actions while creating the virtual assistant so I suggest that the IBM Watson Assistant development team would work on creating sample templates for some simple to advanced actions according to industry to help kick-start the process of creating the initial virtual assistant.
  • IBM Watson Assistant is great, but it is not magic on its own; it requires more extensions which, in my opinion, are very limited to a few possibilities. Enhancing the extensions with other products, including open-source solutions, ought to be a priority for the Watson Assistant development team.
  • IBM Watson Assistant has helped reduce our daily calls by 50%.
  • Watson Assistant has freed up our agents' time to make them more efficient and productive by focusing on more complex customer issues thanks to the virtual assistant's ability to answer more than 50% of clients' questions and handing off the calls to agents all the while sharing the initial details of the issue with the agents to be prepared for the client's phone call.
  • Improved customer satisfaction by 100% right after the initial implementation of our virtual assistant, which we kept improving and regularly updating to avoid it being stale and not meeting customer expectations.
I am generally satisfied with IBM Watson Assistant, and I strongly believe it delivers on its promises. The outcomes are seen so quickly if the virtual assistant is implemented in a way that allows for AI to power self-learning, crawl web FAQs, and integrate with search options as well as telephony and incident management systems. There is still room for improvement, as described in the previous section, in things that need to be available to make IBM Watson Assistant the go-to-market leader for customer care with cognitive assistants.
AI and NLP feature powering IBM Watson Assistant helped us deliver an excellent customer experience not only through the web but also through mobile web, telephony, and the capabilities of Watson Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Text which support various languages, including German, which made the client-agent conversations seem so real, especially with the options of translation and transliteration. Clients were very impressed when we gave a demo of these features, and they certainly asked for it to be integrated with the next releases of the current implementation, which does not have speech and text capabilities.
I have not yet evaluated other products like IBM Watson Assistant, but I have read that Kore.ai competes well with IBM Watson Assistant for the first place as a market leader, and it has won the first place due to a number of reasons, including a more intuitive and customizable UI, a huge library of APIs and more extension possibilities, especially with open source tools. Not to mention that IBM Watson Assistant is slightly more expensive than Kore.ai in terms of subscriptions. I look forward to evaluating Kore.ai with a hands-on approach in order to be able to provide a more thorough review of the product in the near future.

Do you think IBM watsonx Assistant delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM watsonx Assistant's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM watsonx Assistant live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM watsonx Assistant go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM watsonx Assistant again?

Yes

I strongly believe that IBM Watson Assistant is well suited for the following: - managing call centers dealing with huge numbers of calls and offering clients the option to self-serve through virtual assistants that can learn and adapt. - automating repetitive workflows in a way that allows clients to go through a series of steps to achieve the desired outcome, such as a password reset, requesting an update on an incident and/or request, checking account balance, ordering products and/or services, checking product availability and stock levels, etc. However, IBM Watson Assistant still needs further improvements, especially for clients who do not wish to implement a virtual assistant that has a UI and they wish to leverage Assistant through API calls to integrate with other systems. The current APIs are still missing several useful APIs and more resources to allow clients to learn how to implement, deploy and use Watson Assistant without its UI.