November 2020. Open International is pleased to announce that it has formed an alliance with IBM (NYSE: IBM) to accelerate the digital transformation of the customer experience in the Utility market. Fueled by the “Age of the Customer,” across industries, today’s consumers expect customer-centric experiences that are simple and intuitive. The Open International’s Open Smartflex platform and IBM’s Cognitive Customer Care solution will help utilities meet this demand through a comprehensive set of cognitive and core capabilities that will evolve continuously.
By teaming, IBM and Open International will work to transform workflows in utilities by bringing additional AI functionality to engage customers with personalized experiences and create a seamless journey across every interaction. For example, by connecting the Open Smartflex platform with IBM Watson Discovery it will make it possible to rapidly build cognitive, cloud-based exploration applications that unlock actionable insights hidden in unstructured data across the platform. IBM Watson Assistant will bring full-service AI to digital and voice channels, to respond to account inquiries and empower customer service agents with optimal processes.
“We look forward to working hand in hand with Open International to help deliver advanced digital capabilities, unlock trapped value, improve efficiency and provide a future ready platform to allow for future growth for US utility companies. As a team, we believe that we can digitally transform utilities’ operations with an innovative, agile solution along with our experienced leadership” said Brad Gammons, IBM’s Managing Director for Energy, Environment and Utilities.
“Working with IBM will allow Open International, as a product-focused company, to leverage our product expertise, and offers US clients implementation teams with deep subject matter expertise in local business practices. We are impressed not only with the knowledge of the IBM staff, but also with their agility and focus on their customers’ needs. With IBM, we can deliver a disruptive platform to the industry and innovate in a traditional and complex market” states Hernando Parrott, Open International’s President for North America.
This initiative will deliver a much-needed Cognitive Customer Care platform to the utilities industry. Open International and IBM will aim to successfully transform business processes into rich customer journeys to offer a premiere level of customer experience. Stay tuned for an upcoming virtual session.
About Open International
Since its inception in 1987, Open International has provided technology that helps Telecommunications and Utility service providers meet their business goals and implement innovative business strategies. Open’s software solution has allowed our clients to stay on top of their industry’s biggest challenges by giving them the agility to act on current-day and future problems. We believe that through truly great technology, we can help simplify the way service providers operate, create value, and increase customer satisfaction. With these core values, we created our single, state-of-the-art, comprehensive product: Open Smartflex is a holistic, multi-service, preconfigured software solution that provides a powerful billing engine, a robust customer care suite, an agile mobile workforce management system, a smart metering engine and hundreds of other functionalities to satisfy our clients’ core needs.
About IBM
IBM has been leading customer transformation projects and has built cognitive enterprises around the globe in many consumer facing industries. With utility expertise in over 50 countries, IBM works with the top 10 of the world’s largest publicly listed electric utilities and 8 out of the top 10 of the world’s largest publicly listed water utilities to help transform the companies for the future.
https://www.ibm.com/industries/energy
Media Contacts:
Maria Corredor, US Marketing Communications Specialist, Open International
Maria del Mar Caldas, Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations Chief, Open International