IBM Drives Lenovo Call Centers with AI
Computer maker Lenovo has tapped IBM to supply field services and remote call center solutions to enhance the commercial customer experience in the North America, EMEA, and Latin America markets. The $240 million agreement builds on the success of a partnership that began in 2005.
When a customer connects with an agent for Lenovo Think-branded PCs and monitors, the agent will already know who they are talking to and the issue they're calling about. IBM's Virtual Assistant for Technical Support uses natural language capabilities and contextual recognition to personalize the conversation by asking the right questions about service issues and obtaining solution advice while accessing customer information.
"Providing customers with leading-edge technology solutions and offering great support services go hand in hand with the customer's total experience," said Jammi Tu, chief operating officer of Lenovo Intelligent Devices. "We are increasing our service capabilities through IBM's Virtual Assistant for Technical Support, augmented reality and weather technology, helping us deliver the fast, personalized and consistent care customers expect from their trusted technology brand."
The solution is designed to decrease service costs for Lenovo while growing profitability by integrating the global coverage and capacity of IBM's customer engagement centers and field service solutions around the world with its standard package of cognitive solutions, including:
- Virtual Assistant for Technical Support: Harvests and analyzes customer history and preferences, product manuals, technical documentation, and other available content such as FAQs, forum postings and social media Q&A, to be at the fingertips of call center agents.
- Weather alerting: With IBM's schedule optimizing tools, the system alerts call center agents and field technicians of weather conditions in real time, up to 72 hours in advance and, based on GPS locations, can predict accessibility to a client's location to set expectations on service windows.
- Augmented reality: Enables more than 19,000 field agents to deliver a consistent client experience by allowing customers to video-sharing the devices needing repair to IBM's experts, who can virtually draw on top of the video and explain the repair steps.
"Data is having an unprecedented impact on call centers, with artificial intelligence taking customer service to a whole new level of personalization," said Martin Jetter, IBM's senior vice president of global technology services. "This global collaboration with Lenovo further strengthens our long-standing relationship, empowering every single call center and field service agent at Lenovo to deliver service excellence using the power of Watson AI."