Converting website traffic into happy customers with a smart virtual assistant

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With a long track record of guiding companies across various sectors through digital transformation, IBM Business Partner WM Promus is now focusing AI innovation.

Eileen O’Mahony, General Manager at WM Promus, explains how her company helped a UK-based commercial finance brokerage enhance customer experience, and develop new sales leads using IBM watsonx and IBM Watson Discovery.

Streamlining customer experience

One of our clients is an award-winning commercial broker, providing a full suite of funding services including unsecured loans, commercial mortgages and finance for corporate operators. As an independent broker who is not tied to particular lenders, their website is visited by thousands of business customers every month.

As a provider of funding solutions, the company cannot simply sell financing packages online. Instead, prospective customers must call or email to discuss the most suitable option. As well as potentially putting off busy customers from progressing with a query, this process increased lead qualification workloads for sales teams and, therefore, costs to the business.

In addition to this, our client is part of a diverse group of enterprises, with sister companies providing complementary services such as insurance, stocktaking, valuations and so on. At times, customers have inquiries that align with these additional services. By seamlessly referring the customers to relevant services within the group and passing their details to the appropriate teams, the company can further enhance customer experience and create additional sales opportunities.

To address these challenges, our client looked to transform the sales process and was especially interested in exploring the potential of AI-powered virtual assistants. That’s when they reached out to us at WM Promus. We’re experts in digital transformation, and our talented team of software developers, engineers and systems consultants were delighted to help.

The client came to us with a simple proposal: develop a virtual assistant that could capture key contact details and information about new prospects whilst also differentiating between real and spurious leads. Crucially, the company wanted a quick turnaround for any new solution and aimed to minimise upfront investment in development work.

Selecting precision tools

We immediately began looking for the best tools for the job to meet our client’s needs. As an IBM Business Parter, we had heard a lot about IBM watsonx, but we hadn’t used the solution ourselves in any client projects. We’re experts in AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and we had a strong hunch that combining our talents with a powerful solution like watsonx would deliver excellent results.

To kick-start the project, we collaborated with our Technical Pre-Sales contact at IBM, who led the effort, along with support from IBM Client Engineering, to complete a quick proof of concept (PoC) for IBM watsonx Assistant and IBM Watson Discovery. Our long-standing partnership with IBM provided us with direct access to their deep expertise and innovative technologies, ensuring a seamless integration of watsonx into our client’s environment.

We were immediately impressed with intuitive the IBM solutions were, and that we could create a working first iteration of the virtual assistant within a very short time. We respected the client’s request to move as rapidly as possible and used the model that we developed during the PoC as the basis for the solution, which massively accelerated our development cycle.

Establishing a single point of contact

Today, our client uses watsonx Assistant as a single point of contact for all prospective customers on its website. When customers raise queries, the assistant automatically directs them to the right resources and contacts across all group companies, enhancing the customer experience with responsive, accurate support.

One of the major benefits of the new virtual assistant is that it provides our client with a wealth of information that sales teams can use to develop strong leads. The information gathered by watsonx Assistant is unstructured, but IBM Watson Discovery transforms it to give our client a rich array of capabilities for interrogating, analysing and interpreting it.

Unlike human sales teams, the virtual assistant never sleeps or takes holidays, which means our client now has its door open to new prospects 24/7, all year round. Impressed with this increased exposure to potential customers, our client is now adding the virtual assistant to all group company websites.

If you’re interested in seeing how IBM watsonx Assistant can help your organisation win new customers and streamline administration, book a demo today. 

About the author

Over 25 years, Eileen O’Mahony has brought her extensive expertise to a wide range of projects – integrating IT estate discovery tools, automating infrastructure builds, deploying cloud native security solutions, managing an SaaS based RPA solution, and more.

WM Promus is a software consultancy specialising in ITOM, DevOps and RPA. As an IBM Business Partner, the organisation is an expert at harnessing IBM solutions to solve complex problems and common business challenges.