Introducing Watson Discovery for Salesforce: An AI-Powered Insight Engine for CRM

Deluxe Corporation uses Watson Discovery for Salesforce to help all customer reps provide excellent service

By Rashida Hodge, Vice President, IBM Watson Embed and Strategic Partnerships

In January, Salesforce and IBM strengthened their strategic partnership to deliver new joint solutions that leverage the power of AI and enable companies to make smarter decisions, faster than ever before. As a continuation of their partnership, IBM is announcing Watson Discovery for Salesforce, which marries the intelligent, customer-centric power of the Salesforce Platform with Watson's industry-leading NLP and domain mastery to create an AI-powered insight engine to help customer service agents resolve complicated cases. Watson Discovery for Salesforce – which will be unveiled tomorrow at Dreamforce – is the first Watson product available on Salesforce’s AppExchange.

On stage at Dreamforce, Deluxe Corporation – one of the largest check printers and small business marketing companies in the US – will discuss how they are already using the product. Deluxe has been serving financial institutions and small businesses for over 100 years and maintains a contact center staffed with employees of all experience levels to help their customers with a myriad of financial service questions. Now, using Watson Discovery for Salesforce, the company seeks to make their newest agents as competent and as efficient as the more seasoned staff as quickly as possible. Deluxe has laid out their vision of Watson Discovery for Salesforce becoming the de facto federated search engine across their enterprise to improve agent response times, provide more consistency across the call center, and increase net promoter scores and client satisfaction.

Additionally, systems integrators – such as Bluewolf, an IBM company – and business partners, are bringing the power of the Watson Discovery for Salesforce technology to their clients, and integrating it into clients’ existing Salesforce systems. Learn more about those certified to deliver this solution here.

Customer Service is Critical for Business Success

Businesses like Deluxe face customer service challenges every day. No matter how mobile or connected a business is, customers are more connected and more vocal than ever. Consider that 52% of customers will stop patronizing a brand after one bad customer service interaction, and 66% of U.S. consumers say the most important thing a brand can do is value their time.

Clearly, if a business isn’t meeting the customer’s needs, then it must transform, but leveling up your entire customer service team is not an easy transformation for any company to tackle.

Your reps’ success depends on them having easy access to relevant case resolving material, but information in many companies is largely unstructured and decentralized. So, when your reps need answers to a customer’s question, the retrieval of helpful information is likely difficult and time-consuming.

New Watson Discovery for Salesforce Helps Agents Provide Excellent Service

Watson Discovery for Salesforce lets you easily ingest your company’s data from a variety of common enterprise data sources. Just show Watson where to look, and it will crawl your PDFs and text documents, ingesting valuable insights to create a single, cloud-based data source. Once all the knowledge of your business has been ingested, Watson Discovery for Salesforce can draw upon that information, plus past customer cases and issues, to provide agents the understanding they need to serve your customers and keep them happy. Watson uses AI to analyze unstructured data within and outside of Salesforce, and is complementary to Salesforce’s Einstein AI platform.

Watson Discovery for Salesforce is not a simple search engine – it’s an insight engine, which taps into the unified knowledge base you’ve created, and through an amalgam of AI-powered search, embedded natural language processing, domain customization, passage retrieval, semantic understanding, and machine learned relevancy, provides insightful recommendations your reps will need to resolve customer issues. It learns from past customer cases to improve with every interaction, and understands what’s relevant to your business, your customers, and your service reps, to proactively recommend pertinent solutions.

It’s also easy to configure the app with Salesforce’s drag and drop Lighting UI dashboard. Once configured, all your agents need to do is select the customer case and Watson will automatically populate augmented results, and if the rep finds the content useful, they can attach it to the case with just a click. Agents are able to manually query the system as well. While Watson learns from past customer cases it also collects that interaction data, so admins can check their dashboard to see how agents are finding information, what kind of approach is proving most useful, and gain insight into content utilization or potential issues that require action.

Watson Discovery for Salesforce is one of the many Watson solutions designed for the Salesforce ecosystem to enhance customer experiences. Independently from and complementary to Watson Discovery for Salesforce, Next Best Action allows agents to understand what to do next when resolving customer cases, and Lead Generation analyzes unstructured data sources in news articles to prioritize the best leads.

When all of your customer service reps can easily access the entire knowledge base of your organization in moments and receive clear insights, that means every one of your agents is your best agent. If you are interested in getting started with Watson Discovery for Salesforce for your Service Cloud needs, please contact us and learn more about the Watson and Salesforce solutions.

Image: Today, IBM is introducing Watson Discovery for Salesforce, an AI-powered insight engine for customer relationship management. In this image, Watson Discovery for Salesforce proactively queries the case title and surfaces similar, previously resolved cases. In this situation, the customer is having trouble refreshing a collection, and the agent can see how previous cases with the same issue were resolved. (Credit: IBM)