There is an ongoing discussion as to whether consumers prefer interacting either with chatbots or with people. With the proliferation of AI, this conversation is not going away any time soon. However, at Bakstage.AI, we don’t believe that it should be an either/or proposition.  

Instead, we think AI should be used to empower sales specialists and customer service professionals with insights in real-time and post-conversations, so that every interaction can be extremely personalized and tailored to each customer.  

That’s why we founded Bakstage.AI, to make business and customer interactions more personal with AI. Our platform is designed to help boost conversion rates while simplifying the work of customer service specialists. We emphasize augmenting, rather than replacing, the invaluable human element in customer interactions. 

Today, we are excited to share that we have embedded IBM watsonx.ai into the Bakstage.AI platform, which will help enable our clients to inject even more personalization into their online customer experience.  

Bakstage.AI’s unique approach to boost customer conversions in the AI era 

Bakstage provides businesses with an embedded AI-powered 1:1 video concierge service called AI Sales Assist, which helps shift interactions from static, one-size-fits-all customer experiences to modern, dynamic and hyper-personalized engagements. Using Bakstage an online customer can connect with a sales representative or an in-store specialist via a 1:1 live video call right on the website, which can lead to more seamless customer conversations. 

Our AI capabilities, enhanced by IBM watsonx.ai, provide deep insights into the customer journey, generating AI call summaries, follow-up workflows with necessary action items, feedback for human agents and sentiment analysis, allowing for data-driven strategy adjustments and a truly personalized sales process. These features can be especially valuable to companies within the B2B SaaS, retail, financial services and insurance industries that manage complex customer inquiries in multiple languages and industry use cases. 

For example, many of us have found ourselves in a situation where we are trying to describe a product to a sales agent but unfortunately, that did not go so well. Bakstage is solving these complex queries and requests in real time by leveraging AI to scan through product catalogs within seconds to find exactly what the customer is looking for. 

How watsonx helps personalize the customer experience  

Watsonx was a natural fit for our team—the technology best fit our unique needs and we have been working with IBM for several years. In fact, as part of IBM’s AI mentorship program with MassChallenge, they’ve helped us by sharing insights into the booming AI industry advising on our GTM strategy as we scale our business.  

IBM’s portfolio of AI tools, fortified by strong AI guardrails and a governance framework, is instrumental in helping to develop our platform responsibly. For example, watsonx NLP enables Bakstage.AI to provide sentiment analysis on conversations with customers, which can provide insight on how to serve the customer better and how our clients can train their staff more efficiently to improve customer experience. Additionally, Bakstage.AI has embedded and trained the Mixtral-8x7B to capture pre-defined customer data and provide guided feedback to clients regarding the outcome of a customer conversation via watsonx text generation.  

Support from technical experts on the IBM Ecosystem Engineering team has also helped to address CX industry challenges and realize our vision. 

Human + AI = The future of customer service 

We believe that the best customer experiences will be driven by a human agent, assisted using AI. We are very excited to scale Bakstage.AI with IBM watsonx.ai to better equip global sales teams to help boost conversions.