IBM Services Signs $240M Agreement with Lenovo

IBM announced that it will supply field services and remote call center solutions to enhance the commercial customer experience for Lenovo in its North America, EMEA, and Latin America markets. The $240M USD multi-year agreement continues to build on the success of the IBM-Lenovo relationship that began in 2005.

Today's customers' expectations for service are changing, and they want to have everything inter-connected, 24x7 with one swipe at a high level of speed and accessibility. In fact, according to IBM's research, more than $1 trillion is spent on 265 billion customer service calls each year industry-wide, with 50% of those calls going unresolved. That data, compounded by a recent report, revealed that poor customer service is costing businesses more than $75 billion a year, up $13 billion since 2016.

Meanwhile, information overload is a huge issue, with support agents sorting through a deluge of technical documentation on the spot like new product releases, updated technical info, machine data, service history and client-specific instructions. The pressure is on to fix issues quickly and accurately and to improve customer experience and evolve the call center to one that is faster, better quality, cheaper and more predictable.

This agreement takes customer care to the next level. Now, when a customer connects with an agent for Lenovo Think-branded PCs and monitors, not only does the agent already know who they are talking to and the issue they are calling about, IBM's Virtual Assistant for Technical Support uses its natural language capabilities and contextual recognition, to personalize the conversation by asking the right questions about service issues and obtaining solution advice, while also accessing key customer information.

The solution, facilitated by IBM, is designed to decrease service costs for Lenovo while growing profitability by integrating the global coverage and capacity of IBM's Customer Engagement Centers (CEC) and field service solutions around the world, with its standard package of cognitive solutions. It includes virtual assistant for technical support, weather alerting technologies and augmented reality for more than 19,000 field agents.