IBM has launched an initiative aimed at helping its staff improve their interaction with customers and other staff. The IBM Customer Experience Lab is supposed to help both IBM and other businesses by allowing them to gather more feedback from social networks, the target audience and the workforce.
Mahmoud Naghshineh, IBM vice president of services research, believes emerging technologies, including social media and mobile tech, are changing the way organisations get feedback from their customers. With that in mind, there is a need to tap them as soon as possible.
“Today, businesses have a completely different way of engaging customers,” he said. “There are all these new ways of reaching out to people [but] you need to know when the right time is to engage.”
The new lab will allow clients to access IBM researchers and consultants, who will then deliver systems that learn and personalize the experiences of each individual customer, identify patterns, preferences and create context from Big Data, and drive scale economics. The whole idea is similar to IBM’s Services Lab, launched a couple of years ago.
IBM says the new customer oriented lab will focus its efforts on helping customers obtain more insight into their user base. IBM will use machine learning and visual analytics to predict differences in individual customers, thereby customizing services to a much greater extent.
The lab will be staffed by more than a hundred IBM researchers from across the world and it will also offer clients a number of workshops for generating new ideas. Although the lab will be headquartered in New York, it will feature researchers from twelve IBM labs around the globe, from Africa, Brazil, Israel, India and Japan, to the United States.
