Accelerating cognitive solutions with cloud managed services
A recent internal IBM survey found that 70 percent of IT leaders are looking to expand the capabilities of their IT landscape by integrating cognitive technology.
As mentioned in previous Thoughts on Cloud blog posts, deploying your IT environment with a cloud managed services solution can free up IT staff to focus more on innovation while also helping organizations avoid the costs associated with an on-premises data center.
These benefits seem particularly relevant for cognitive solutions. Allowing skilled specialists to handle day-to-day IT management can help businesses reach the benefits of cognitive computing faster and more effectively.
With that in mind, here are three examples of companies that have used cloud managed services to help save time and reduce costs, accelerating the benefits of cognitive technology.
An insurance company noticed that its customers were increasingly choosing short-term contracts that allowed them to shop around and switch providers more frequently. As a result, the company decided that improving customer satisfaction through a better user experience needed to be a top priority.
To achieve this goal, the company focused on the customer experience offered at its call centers. Its existing IT environment couldn’t analyze the massive amounts of data associated with each customer interaction in a way that could yield usable insight.
In response, the company deployed a natural language processing (NLP) analytics solution in a managed cloud environment. Powered by IBM Watson technology, this solution can collect and analyze hundreds of thousands of records, providing insights that the business can use to prepare for customer queries before they occur.
This approach has resulted in fewer inbound calls from disgruntled customers, increased rates of completed customer calls and improved customer satisfaction. Since implementation, the call center has increased its rate of completed calls by more than 11 percent and received the highest possible satisfaction rating. The company accomplished this while cutting costs by reducing the need for supplemental operators to handle peak call volumes.
Up-to-the-minute weather updates are nothing new. Users have had that information at their fingertips for years, but one transportation company recently discovered it could use cognitive computing to transform weather data into usable business insight.
