Building on the success, this digital transformation project with IBM iX has an impact far beyond the initial scope. The customer service teams at BSH have changed their mindset and approach to future IT projects. An agile way of thinking now revolutionizes decision-making across the company and puts more emphasis on usability.
A stronger focus on internal as well as external users is at the heart of how the company designs new processes and tools. As a next step, BSH plans to create a new bAdvancing app which will deliver dashboards featuring key performance indicators, with gamification of results to boost motivation.
BSH also wants to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence technology from Apple and IBM, such as IBM Watson® Services for Core ML. With support from IBM, the company seeks to equip its customer service professionals with customized product recommendations for every customer service job. By using contextual information such as location and time of the year, BSH hopes to make customers even more attractive offerings and further increase sales revenues.
By 2020, BSH plans to roll the apps out to 30 countries. Martina Krenn confirms, “The rollout has been a big success, and deployment to new countries is driven by country managers actively asking to onboard their teams as soon as possible. This is a strong indicator of high user acceptance of the new iPad apps.”
Martina Krenn concludes, “We have come a long way together with Apple and IBM. We took a significant risk when redesigning so many processes, but supported by IBM, the strategy has paid off.
“Our learning from this implementation is that we will use this agile mindset as default approach for future projects, and we look forward to our journey with IBM to become a Cognitive Enterprise.”