Contact Center Solutions for Utility Companies

For a sector where companies need to provide uninterrupted basic amenities and constant customer care and problem-solution, it is of high importance to be in close touch with their customers and their issues. The utilities sector is increasingly implementing WhatsApp chatbots in order to streamline its customer experience and automate many service offerings. Chatbots allow businesses to connect with customers in a personal way without the expense of human representatives. For example, many of the questions or issues customers have are common and easily answered. Chatbots provide a personal alternative to a written FAQ or guide and can even triage questions, including handing off a customer issue to a live person if the issue becomes too complex for the chatbot to resolve.

• These are all examples of scenarios in which you could be encountering a chatbot.
• In a nutshell, conversational AI helps computers communicate with humans.
• Also, it is inefficient for employees to manually handle customer queries because of their repetitive nature.
• As utilities improve the quality and accessibility of their customer service frameworks, they must also find ways to stay as lean as possible while still providing the best possible experience for the customer.
• This is desired by Mercury, as they want to address their customers on topics other than, for example, the bill.
• Typical use cases for RPA are in areas such as processing billing transactions in high volumes, managing consumption metering, and compiling customer records.

Every single one of those customers expects straightforward access to satisfying service. “We need to be continuously testing new digital technologies that can be rapidly deployed to delight our customers,” Menendez says. A French provider of bottled gas, such as liquefied petroleum gas, butane, and propane, Butagaz has over 4 million customers. In an automated way, electricity outages and restoration of service can be communicated to customers.

What does a transactional chatbot enable? An example in the utilities industry ⚡

The solution ensures that energy utility companies do not lose customers even if they shift homes by facilitating efficient communications and support for the transition from one location to the next. Moreover, the solution also generates accurate bills that reflect the final utility consumption at the old address. Chatbots can also be used to improve customer experience by providing real-time updates on service outages, billing issues, and other important information.

Improve customer service while reducing costs and empowering your team. US-based startup Alba Power provides conversational communication solutions for electric utilities. The startup’s AI-based assistant enables residential customers to participate in peak load, rebates, or other energy-related programs and offers a white-label communication extension to the energy services. Further, it reduces peak load for service providers, increases program enrollments, automates frequently asked questions (FAQs), and keeps customers engaged by simplifying home energy management.

Advanced Generative AI Chatbots

Another success story related to AI is Exelon, an electricity provider with over 10 million consumers. The company was experiencing consumer churn because the users were unable to access information easily. Every time the company received a complaint about this issue, they had to arrange a staff metadialog.com visit to the location to understand the issues. Naturally, utilizing the popular and user-friendly app to communicate with your users is a fruitful way to retain customers and enhance your brand value. Public and private utilities can be responsible for millions of individual customers.

With the help of WhatsApp chatbot for utilities, you can automate live support and allow your customers to reach out to you through a medium they are well-acquainted with. Utility companies have long relied on traditional call centers to meet customer service needs. Now, those centralized, human-intensive operations may no longer be a best practice, and support professionals must be protected without sacrificing quality of service. The true power of Exelon’s chatbot is that it will connect to long-running IT systems that contain the customer data and operations data needed to make responses meaningful. Another good example of chatbots in the utilities industry is Butagaz’s virtual assistant. If you’d like a demo of our enterprise conversational AI platform or if you would like to discuss the use cases for chatbots for your business goals please contact us and we’ll be in touch.

Alba Power focuses on Conversational AI

AI is being used to automate customer service tasks, such as responding to customer inquiries, providing customer support, and managing customer data. AI-powered chatbots can answer customer questions quickly and accurately, reducing the need for human customer service agents. AI can also be used to analyze customer data to provide personalized services and recommendations. Employing bots in place of live agents saves a lot of money and time for the utilities.

• Once the bot goes into production, one of the main tasks is to monitor the bot daily for at least the first 3 weeks.
• With chatbots, companies are assured of the quality of their customer support services.
• The company created an AI-powered chatbot that helped its customers ask several questions and understand the information related to their utility bills and outages.
• Chatbots do not need food, water, rest, vacations, a large tricked-out office, or an expensive HR team.
• “I don’t want to call up the utility, they take away a lot of time from my day,” said an annoyed utility customer.
• Eventually, every person can have a fully functional personal assistant right in their pocket, making our world a more efficient and connected place to live and work.

As the technology continues to evolve, chatbots will become even more useful in helping energy and utilities companies provide better customer service. The energy and utilities sector is undergoing a digital transformation, and chatbots are playing a key role in enhancing customer service. Chatbots are computer programs that use artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate conversations with humans. They can help energy and utilities companies provide faster, more efficient customer service and help customers get the information they need quickly and easily. “I don’t want to call up the utility, they take away a lot of time from my day,” said an annoyed utility customer. Due to large call volumes, utility customer care lacks the efficiency of answering customer queries in a brief time.

Who trains the chatbot?

Via chatbots, without any complicated process, they can simply carry out the handover process through chatbots. Chatbots can ask for certain information necessary for the relocation, like the old meter readings, the handover dates, customer information, etc. After https://www.metadialog.com/blog/examples-and-benefits-of-using-chatbots-for-utilities/ collecting the data, it can then notify the competent bodies of the alterations. Online messaging should include what to expect when they click customer care links. Inform customers through regular channels such as bill inserts, newsletters, and social media.

By analyzing customer reviews, energy and utilities companies can quickly identify areas where they need to improve their service. This could include addressing customer complaints or providing better information about their products and services. AI-powered algorithms can detect suspicious activity in customer accounts and alert the energy and utilities company to take action. This can help to reduce the risk of fraud and ensure that customers are not being overcharged.

One-Stop Shop for all Consumer Interactions

And when IVAs manage common inquiries, live agents have more availability to address customers with more complex issues. This efficiency creates a competitive advantage for any company that’s implemented conversational AI. Increasing consumer expectations, aging infrastructure, and disruptive technologies are all changing the utility sector as we know it today. Besides, most of the processes including handling utility bills, payment options, and promotional offers involve customer communication and can be automated. Therefore, startups develop chatbots to work in parallel with human agents to resolve both simple and complex customer inquiries.

Transform your customer service team with a surge of automated support from AI chatbot technology. The details collected by the chatbot can be directly fed to the internal database or CRM seamlessly. This way, you can have a consolidated view of the log, past conversations, the leads generated, common complaints registered, etc. Due to poor accessibility to information available in the utilities sector, many customers are unaware of the offers and other details. Hence, many offers in the utilities sector expire without providing any benefits to a large number of users.

How Utilities Are Using Chatbots to Improve Customer Care

Unfortunately, past attempts had proven to be inflexible and often created more user frustration. This has the consequence that if an error has occurred during quality control, not the entire customer base is affected and the error can be corrected at an earlier point in time. Technical requirements can drive up the cost of any project, so as mentioned above, you should first define and limit the scope. However, the technical requirements should influence e.g. the choice of platform, as synergy effects can arise. Thanks to the simplicity of JennyBot and with the frequent and fast support from GetJenny, we are able to keep training our digital co-worker more and more every day.“