The Cognitive Contact Center (CCC) provides interactions that deliver on these changing customer expectations based on the cognitive ability to understand, reason, and learn from every interaction. With the ability to speak using natural, freeform language, the CCC helps the customer by understanding and leveraging data from various sources. By learning from each interaction, the combination of Watson and Blueworx interactive voice response (IVR) continuously drives towards creating a truly incredible customer experience

1. blueworx.com
The Building Blocks
of the Cognitive
Contact Center

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Everyone who manages a contact center knows the objective. However, very few are using all
the tools available to get the results that are needed. It is apparent that AI is making big moves in
customer experience and if you are not considering how to take hold of it within your own contact
center, you very well may be left behind. Creating a cognitive interaction with customers is driving real
results in customer loyalty and wallet share for companies across all industries. Are you one of them?
If not, your competition might be starting to market to your customers the benefits of their cognitive
contact center.
Imagine for a moment calling into a local business outfitted with an interactive voice response system
that is meant to automate the routing of your call and get you to the right person. You know right away
whether this experience will be good – or bad.
You are presented with generic routing options of which none address the reason you are calling. You
repeat the menu again, only to be frustrated that nothing matches what you are calling about. The
next, and seemingly only option, is to just press zero to get to a live agent. This process translates to
lost opportunity and lost money, not to mention a frustrated customer and agent.
What if that experience could be completely different – even
enjoyable? Imagine if, when you called, you were greeted with
a natural, free-form conversational manner – “How can I help
you today?”. A fluid conversation that lets you speak freely and
actually get what you need. Of course, you can still opt to speak
to a person, but it will be the right person, and actually you
quite like this self-service that you’ve become accustomed to
on websites and apps. In addition, the system understands and
learns from each interaction to improve and deliver more relevant
and personalized options.
This approach offers customers a more engaging experience.
We call this the “Cognitive Contact Center” and you can achieve
it by layering AI as a higher-level thinking process atop those
traditional IVR systems’ call routing. By leveraging the natural
language speech-to-text and applying intelligent applications,
your customer experience can deliver on the balancing act of
two conflicting agendas (the business and its customers) and
ultimately offer an amazing customer experience.
How can I help
you today?
AI

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What is the Cognitive Contact Center? A center that unlocks the customer experience opportunity by
leveraging data from external, internal, structured, unstructured, voice, and visual sources in order to
deliver a unique and enjoyable experience for customers.
The Cognitive Contact Center (CCC) provides interactions that deliver on these changing customer
expectations based on the cognitive ability to understand, reason, and learn from every interaction.
With the ability to speak using natural, freeform language, the CCC helps the customer by
understanding and leveraging data from various sources. By learning from each interaction, the
combination of Watson and Blueworx interactive voice response (IVR) continuously drives towards
creating a truly incredible customer experience.
So, how do you create this experience with Watson and implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) with
your interactive voice response to deliver a more efficient and natural interaction? How can you
continuously improve the quality of every customer interaction with confidence? It’s all about how
you take advantage of Watson and Blueworx IVR to deliver a natural, knowledgeable, and relevant
customer experience each and every time.
Cognitive Contact Center

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There are three tenets to the Cognitive Contact Center: Interaction, Knowledge, Learning. Individually,
they can improve the interaction with the caller, but together deliver an experience that rivals a human
agent.
INTERACTION
The IVR is the first touch your customer has with your business/brand when they contact you; each
and every call is a brand impression. Does your brand personality come through or are you simply
routing based on your own internal departments and silos?
A solution that engages with the customer with personalized, fluid speech, allows them to
communicate their needs in the most natural way possible. No repeating information or waiting on the
phone forever to speak to an agent.
By using AI conversation services with your IVR, the caller’s intents can be understood even if their
speech doesn’t fit into the programmed grammars. There’s less chance of a robotic request to repeat
themselves, and less time is required to develop the application as the keywords or grammars don’t
need to be exhaustive.
Artificial Intelligence can transform the interaction. The key is making that interaction customized,
relevant, and natural to the caller every time.
KNOWLEDGE
With a more intelligent interaction, customers feel engaged and understood. We now shift to using our
understanding of the caller’s intent along with AI to provide the caller or agent with the knowledge they
require. Gone are the days of massive knowledge bases that offered policies and procedure that an
agent had to wade through to get an answer or direction.
AI makes every interaction smarter, faster, and more productive for the customer and the agent. It
has the opportunity to significantly reduce the cost to serve customers by gathering and providing
information to the customer and offering a resolution or recommendation before they need to hit an
agent. This can include cross-selling new services or other benefits that the customer should consider
and an agent may never get too due to call resolution times.
The key is discovering the links between the massive quantity of unstructured data already held in the
company and leveraging that knowledge in a productive and efficient way.
Unlocking the Power of the Cognitive Contact Center

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LEARNING
Every customer interaction provides the opportunity to improve and this continuous learning is
key to building a truly autonomous self-service. To begin with, the AI engine can learn from human
interactions until sufficient knowledge has been assimilated such that the AI engine is able to offer
suggestions to agents. As the engine continues to learn, it is able handle many calls itself with fall-
back to a human agent.
With AI, gathering data from each customer interaction across channels enables you to exceed the
expectations of customers in terms of service quality and problem resolution. As more information is
available the more relevant and personalized and even proactive your business can be for customers.
Engaging in AI learning creates a closed loop process where all inputs are gathered, analyzed and
leveraged for future interactions. As this process increases so does the opportunity for more autonomy
within the contact center, enabling agents to focus on other higher value issues such as cross-selling
to customers.
A combination of the fluid AI Interaction with AI Knowledge and closed-loop, continuous learning
enables increasing automation that engages with customers in new ways, unlocking insights that
likely would be missed by standard research methods. It’s like having the power of thousands of data
analyst at your fingertips delivering actionable insights at the speed of light for each and every call.

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All of this intelligence in the contact center sounds great, right? However, many contact center leaders
stare blankly when it comes to actually developing a strategy to implement AI in their own contact
center. There are certainly many ways to develop and deploy a solution that best fits your business
without reconstructing everything you have already built.
We call this the 5 levels of Autonomy, each building upon the other in order to create the ultimate
customer experience. No one is interested in a rip and replace of any part of the contact center
ecosystem, yet we want the benefits of new technology. Our goal is to provide a roadmap that can
get you immediate benefits with low risk and that can help you meet the growing demands of your
customer’s expectations.
New speech
engines
Natural
Sounding
Speech
L E V E L 1 L E V E L 2 L E V E L 3
Levels of Contact Center Autonomy
L E V E L 4 L E V E L 5
Agent-assisted
Cognitive
Information
Highly automated
Virtual Agent
Fully autonomous
Cognitive
Interaction
Directed Dialog Directed Dialog Directed Dialog Directed Dialog
Natural
Language
Conversation
Cognitive
Conversation
Mapping Your Cognitive Strategy with 5 Building
Blocks to Intelligent Autonomy

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1. NATURAL SOUNDING SPEECH
A great first step is to implement advanced
speech within the Interactive Voice Response
(IVR) creating a more natural interaction for
customers. Replacing a standard DTMF
call flow that directs customers with various
prompts and menus with that of Watson
Speech-to-Text and Watson Text-to-Speech.
2. COGNITIVE CONVERSATION
Building on the base of a more natural
sounding speech application, the next step
is to add Natural Language Understanding
(NLU), creating a much more fluid conversation.
This guides a customer to the appropriate
application within the call flow in a seamless
process, that allows them to easily speak their
request and land in the appropriate application
for support.
3. COGNITIVE INFORMATION
Increasing in the levels of autonomy with
natural language and conversation provide
paths for intelligent routing and handling of
calls within the IVR, increasing overall call
containment and call resolution for customers.
The next step is to support agents in analyzing
information across channels in order to provide
customers with quick resolution to an issue.
Customers appreciate reaching a live agent
only if they are knowledgeable and can solve
their problem. The application attempts to
solve the problem, providing information to
the agent for call resolution. In addition, this
level of interaction and data analysis can
create opportunities for agents to cross-sell
and up-sell customers on services or products
that fit their profile (personalizing offers to
increase attachment rates). Watson Cognitive
reduces the time on the phone the agent
needs to spend researching or investigating
a customer’s issue and delivers a relevant
and valuable solution in a quick and efficient
manner. This is the new “knowledgebase” that
requires nothing on the part of the agent but to
review the recommendations for resolution.
4. VIRTUAL AGENT
At this stage, any directed dialog within
the application is minimal, setting up for a
complete autonomous self-service experience.
With Watson Cognitive, the application
attempts to solve the problem and provide
the information directly to the customers with
no agent interaction. This highly automated
interaction delivers information to the
customers using a Virtual Agent vs. a live
agent. This enables live agents to focus on
more high value or complicated issues with
customers.
5. COGNITIVE INTERACTION
This level of application is fully autonomous.
The customer uses freeform speech to request
information or report their need for support.
The system responds with a relevant answer
based on the mass amount of data analysis
and machine learning across thousands of
interactions. Each interaction enables the
system to become smarter and make decisions
with confidence. Ask Watson and get back
insights you can trust and are most relevant to
your customer’s specific request. Each call is
transformed into a more relevant and relational
experience.

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Ultimately, in order to stay competitive, businesses need to automatically route callers, reduce talk
time, and maximize agent hours, while at the same time customers simply need a quick resolution
and be delighted with the experience. These conflicting agendas are where we meet the tipping point
between customer satisfaction and costs. Customers are more demanding today with staggering
statistics that businesses must take note of in order to keep and strengthen customer loyalty and
satisfaction.
Access to information and data is at the click of a mouse or swipe of a finger and we collectively
spend much of our daily lives searching and reviewing everything online. This digital age brings with
it many challenges to keep up with the demands of customers that are now accustomed to getting
information and commodities quicker. Plus, many customers now prefer never to talk to an agent at
all—using a more intelligent, self-service approach to complete their task.
Are you ready for a Cognitive Contact Center?
Contextual Profile
recent calls, service requests
Unstructured Data
news, forums, blogs
Business Profile
products, business volume
Sentiment and Mood
angry, sad, joy
Demographic Profile
gender, geo, region, status
Social Media
tweets, Facebook updates

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This is why now is the time for businesses to be forward-thinking when working on customer
engagement strategies in order to deliver on the demands of the new consumer. No longer will a
generic IVR routing to departments that are not interlocked be acceptable to consumers.
The Cognitive Contact Center can unlock insights into the customer experience delivering a unique
and enjoyable experience for customers. It offers your business the opportunity to keep up in real time
with the changing needs and behaviors of customer’s expectations. The ability to understand, reason,
and learn from every interaction and deliver a response that is valued and trusted is why you should
be considering how to take the steps to create a cognitive experience for your customers.
Improving the quality of each and every conversation by leveraging mass amounts of data from a
number of sources and then continuing to learn and grow in knowledge is the key to creating an
autonomous self-service success story.
Our team of Cognitive experts are ready to help you start planning your strategy today. Learning
from each interaction, the combination of Watson and Blueworx interactive voice response (IVR)
continuously drives towards creating a truly amazing customer experience. Let us show you the path
forward to higher level customer satisfaction.
Contact us at www.blueworx.com.