Joab Jackson of Network World reports, “IBM has started a new practice to help organizations interact more effectively with their customers through the use of social media and other emerging technologies. ‘Today, businesses have a completely different way of engaging customers,’ said Mahmoud Naghshineh, IBM vice president of services research, noting that social media and mobile technologies have provided organizations new forms of feedback from their customers. ‘There are all these new ways of reaching out to people [but] you need to know when the right time is to engage.’ The IBM Customer Experience Lab will provide clients with access to both IBM researchers and IBM business analysis consultants, who will generate new ways for clients to communicate with customers and employees.”

Jackson continues, “The practice is similar to the IBM Services Lab, which was launched almost two years ago. The lab, still in operation, focuses on providing clients with more effective ways of managing their IT infrastructure. According to IBM, the new lab will concentrate on helping organizations obtain more insight into their user bases, as well as to communicate more effectively with customers and employees. For greater customer insight, IBM hopes to deploy advanced capabilities such as machine learning and visual analytics to predict differences in individual customers. In this way, organizations could strengthen their customer engagement by personalizing transactions. And to strengthen employee engagement, IBM could help businesses embed semantic, collaborative and multimedia technologies into the workflow.”

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Image: Courtesy IBM