Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. IBM helps its clients capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to its clients.
Nomination Category: Thought Leadership Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Integration of Thought Leadership into the Sales Process
 Nomination Title: Unified Chat Framework: Integrating Sales, Marketing, Support, and Training
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the thought leadership achievements since July 1, 2022 of the nominated organization, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
- Briefly describe the nominated organization: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 184 words used.
The IBM Cognitive Tooling team understands IBM must embrace AI at scale to help drive productivity and efficiency. This small IT delivery team anticipated the need to provide AI at scale through a chat powered solution that makes it easy for all IBM teams to onboard their specific business needs into an AI powered chat experience. The Unified Chat is the IT vision of the IBM Cognitive Tooling team that provides a chat experience that can be implemented almost anywhere on the webpages as well as business applications (such as Salesforce) to support all the following teams: marketing, sales, customer support, training and business partners. The Chat experience is used externally by customers for support and sales, prospective customers in marketing, and business partner engagement. It is used internally by IBM customer support agents, training, and sellers within the Salesforce strategic business platforms. While each of these IBM teams create their specific customer experience, the Unified Chat connects them all together to enable a seamless experience across the experiences, making it much easier for all customers to obtain the information they need from IBM.
- Outline the organization's thought leadership achievements since July 1 2022 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 250 words used.
The Unified Chat framework provides the entire technical setup and tools that enable the chat experience with all functionalities. This means all teams that onboard onto Unified Chat can focus on what they do best: using their expertise to provide the experience and content they need to serve their user base. The framework includes each of the following, which onboarded teams can further refine to their specific needs:
- Business unit specific conversation flows
- Personalization for the users providing account and data specifics for that user.
- Automation of tasks to enable the user to self-serve while requiring less human input from IBMers.
- Intelligent Routing: With nearly 100 onboarded teams, the chat solution uses AI to intelligently determine the best solution to present to our users. For example, if a user comes into the marketing chat experience, but has a product support question, the chat can automatically take the user to the correct support experience to best serve what the customer needs.
- Generative AI: Using a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) approach, the Unified Chat enables each IBM onboarded team to provide a fine-tuned response for each user query. In addition, the IBM Cognitive Tooling Team has also built a hallucination detection system for GenAI responses using Quantum computing to ensure the generated answers are grounded in the content, so they are indeed correct.
- Live chat with a human: If a user requires contact with a human, the Unified Chat framework can route the user to the correct support agent, sales rep, etc.
- Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the team's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 222 words used.
So far this year, the Unified Chat framework has been onboarded by 96 different teams in IBM across sales, marketing, customer support, training, and business partner organizations. The experiences have been enabled on over 60,000 pages across IBM. The volume of the customer conversations in the sales/marketing experiences have grown 490% (to 147K), while users have increased 650% (to 78K). The results have been higher-quality client interests for increased productivity for sales representatives as well as support professionals. For example, the support experiences have enabled the support engineers to be more productive, as the chat experiences have resulted in the avoidance of roughly 300% support cases from being created, saving thousands of hours in potential support effort, and providing for better experience for the customers.
The Cognitive Tooling teams’ vision has created a proactive collaboration across sales, customer service, marketing, and training teams. Each of these IBM teams are proactively collaborating to create effective user experiences across the entire customer engagement process. The growth of the framework continues, as new IBM teams are onboarding their experiences every cycle. The community of each onboarded team helping other teams to increase their efficiency and impact has been nothing short of what IBM has hoped for to make the entire company more productive and efficient. This is all thanks to the Unified Chat framework.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
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