Item: IBM watsonx Assistant
Rating: 8
Author: Hamzah Iessar

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I personally have used this service for onboarding operations of community Campus Ambassadors. Since I work for education sector (Internet) I had to manually onboard students for marketing/campus connect campaigns and often had to strike the first conversation myself (so much to do on prospecting part) due to this I used to miss out on large number of students who were interested while texting or following up with others who at last point of conversation used to turn down the offer. After using this service I created a simple chatbot which is free and my requirement was also below 10,000 messages per month so I used the free plan. The chatbot used to filter our the leads for me after they were prompted with certain set of intents and dialogues that I put up myself according to my requirement and then I used to make a one-on-one conversation. It has saved me hours since then, it has simplified the process and made it smooth. Now, I don't have to worry about the contacts that'll drop after following up and now I can say that my onboarding operation has become more streamlined.

Pros and Cons

Tailor made customization
Qualifying prospects and lead engagement.
Integration with CRM is easy

More should be done on integration part, multiple tools should be readily available to be integrated to.
There should be some intermediate plan for small firms too. Often these firms don't want advanced options and basic is too basic for them.
There should be more control over conversational cues

Return on Investment

Setting up automated tasks has helped my team to have a cut on time leading in a dynamic change and this service has taken it down by 30%
Chatbots are a way forward, using this product we receive more queries most of which lead to qualification
The data provided based on user interactions is so valuable that now we easily know what the intents are and where we can improve with our pitches

Usability

I believe that it does everything a free chatbot should do and the fact that it is from IBM so there is no question on data leaks or privacy. There is full control given and the tutorials are also great which help you get started right away. Easy to make and use and so I gave it a 8 but yes again for large scale enterprises this might not be a go to tool considering it's free subscription has no SMS or push enabled and has a limit. Also its has good prompt accuracy, hence I have rated it high

AI Capabilities

First and the foremost thing is that it supports multiple languages which is key part of our business since we work overseas that was the first thing I had in my mind which IK started- off with it. Also that it is having advanced features like entity recognition and sentiment analaysis to check how the user is prompting and that adds to the customer experience I don 't have to spend much time on it manually to solve FAQ's and queries, the bot is doing much itself. It has reduced the workforce by 1 practically and is saving bucks against the manual queries we were handling before.

Alternatives Considered

Tidio and Chatfuel

Tidio is very very basic and it is not having adequate NLP understanding let alone be sarcasm in language that is a far far distant thing so that's why it was a no from my end to Tidio.With Chatfuel there was only English language in focus and for our business we needed the both of above mentioned limitations so that's how I landed to watsonx Assistant and it worked quite fine for me leveraging everything I was missing out on.

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of IBM watsonx Assistant go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy IBM watsonx Assistant again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Discord, Microsoft Teams, Zoho Analytics

Likelihood to Recommend

Best suited for queries/onboarding/lead qualification/ticketing. ONE-ONE queries. I won't say it's free version is good for conflict resolution however I haven't tried the paid version yet so can't speak much about that. For anything basic if you want to save time with the prospecting part you can use this tool or if you have multiple queries with nearly same intent it becomes a go to tool

Products Replaced

Not Sure

Key Differentiators

Ease of Use

My team is having no technical background whatsoever so all of us practically can't work on Advanced technical Chatbot creation that requires coding. This basic yet productive tool has helped us so much to handle the operational onboarding stress and manual limitations attached to it. Our qualification has increased by 32%

Evaluation Lessons Learned

For starters I'll definitely choose Assistant over others. I did try other chatbots before however faced many limitations and disqualifications, honestly some of them were pathetic but this tool from IBM gets the work done even if there are not many advanced options but what you are doing with it will be accurate and free of omissions. If I would've known before, I would have chosen it right away for my non-tech team

Watsonx assistance is good advanced too for basic and efficient chatbot creation

Overall Satisfaction with IBM watsonx Assistant