AI-enhanced customer self-service ensures your customers have immediate access to more accurate, more personalized responses to their questions. Leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and machine-learning algorithms to better understand customer inquiries, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can respond promptly with personalized responses based on customer preferences and historical interactions. This ensures their replies don’t read like canned templates or boilerplate text; instead, they feel like an authentic human response. Whereas human CSRs work a set number of hours each day, these chatbots are available 24/7 to ensure your customers have resources available to them on their schedule and on their preferred channel.

For inquiries requiring a human touch, AI equips your CSRs with conversation summaries, a robust knowledge base, and customer sentiment analysis to instantly assess a customer’s mood and tailor responses to foster more amicable interactions. It can also assess whether escalation to a supervisor is necessary. At the conclusion of an interaction, a case log provides a full record and summary of the conversation, logging it with the customer’s account. This ensures customers feel as though your utility truly knows them and understands their needs any time they reach out for assistance. This also improves productivity: the next CSR working with this customer won’t need to read through past cases and interactions, they can consult the summary to immediately bring them up to speed.

Training a new CSR to navigate your CIS and independently assist customers with billing questions can take months. But equipped with AI, your utility will realize tremendous acceleration in CSR training time. Onboarding new CSRs becomes quicker and easier by providing them with access to intuitive knowledge bases containing your utility’s training material, FAQs, and policies.

This also enables you to maintain a leaner, more experienced staff capable of the same level of productivity as a much larger team. While AI answers the routine, repetitive, time-consuming customer questions, your CSRs can focus on higher-value operational tasks. This paves the way for much higher productivity and efficiency.