IBM opens lab in Yorktown

IBM Corp. announced March 14 the creation of the IBM Customer Experience Lab, dedicated to helping business leaders transform the way customers experience their products and services through the cloud and other technologies.

The lab will be headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. At the lab, IBM research scientists will work with clients to deliver systems that learn and personalize the experiences of each individual customer, identify patterns, preferences and create context from data and drive scale economics.

IBM has said that “front office transformation of sales, marketing or customer service” is the most important wave of business change since the 1990s.

“Business leaders realize they need to continuously transform their customer experience in order to be relevant and competitive,” said Mahmoud Naghshineh, vice president, services research at IBM in a statement. “What made them successful over the last decade, or even last year, may not be competitive in the future. We will help clients explore the possibilities presented by new assets, technologies and innovation models based on our engagement experiences with thousands of organizations across every industry.”

IBM invests more than $6 billion annually on research and development and employs about 3,000 researchers worldwide.