With the deregulation and privatization of the utility market, the industry’s competitiveness has skyrocketed. Therefore, differentiating yourself by offering a unique experience is the only way to gain a competitive advantage.
Technologies have raised customer expectations across all industries, and the energy and utilities industry is no exception. With AI technologies, energy companies can reduce operating expenses, improve customer experience (CX) and monitor agent performance.
That is why, in this sector, although service and price have always been an important differentiating factor for customers, price differentiation is beginning to be insufficient as customers increasingly demand customer service and experiences in line with their needs. Faced with this situation, utilities are opting for customer experience as a differentiating factor.
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Utilities interact with the customer every day and the level of customer satisfaction during and after these interactions, whether when paying a bill online, reporting a service interruption, asking a question on the phone or requesting a new service, is what defines the customer experience of the utilities industry.
The situation of energy and utilities
According to a study by Neustar, the average call time in utility contact centers increased for 45% of utilities since agents began working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Higher call times not only decrease operational efficiency; they can also degrade the customer experience by increasing average waiting times.
These increased waiting times, staff turnover (which increased in more than 90% of industry contact centers in recent years), customer frustration because of having to repeat information, or difficulty finding needed information, top the list of weaknesses consumers find in call centers in this industry.
All these reasons help explain why the energy and utility industry is the industry with the second lowest customer satisfaction, where more than one-third of consumers consider customer service to be poor. As a result, they are focusing on improving the customer experience to differentiate themselves and retain more customers.
Key challenges
- Efficiently train contact center agents to keep up with complex customer demands and provide them with the solutions and support they need.
- Analyze meaningful interactions that provide insight into customer needs and behavior.
- Detect vulnerable customers to offer them the attention they need through transparent, high-quality customer service.
- Analyze customer interactions to identify areas for improvement and recognize critical areas that produce high operational costs.
Artificial intelligence solutions to improve the energy and utilities industry
Leveraging the vast amount of available data is crucial to rethink processes with a customer-centric view.
By improving the customer experience, utilities can increase customer satisfaction, develop more efficient products, reduce costs, operating times and churn rates, and ultimately increase their customer base.
New solutions based on artificial intelligence help utilities to:
1. Sales analysis and verification.
Thanks to voice analysis, it is possible to understand how customers respond to products or promotions and to know which sales techniques achieve the best results. Artificial intelligence also makes it possible to measure the quality of sales opportunities and monitor the response of leads to offers, identify additional and cross-selling opportunities and detect anomalies in sales made.
2. Identification of customers with higher churn probability
Thanks to artificial intelligence solutions it is possible to automatically identify and analyze interactions to obtain detailed data on customer intent and overall customer experience. With this intelligent conversation analysis, utility contact centers can detect predefined keywords or phrases that may indicate negative customer experiences, dissatisfaction, mentions of competitors, or the intent or threat of customer churn or switching companies.
3. Agent Quality and Performance Monitoring
With the automatic monitoring of artificial intelligence solutions, utilities’ contact centers can analyze and measure the percentage of adherence to the agents’ script in the different parts of the conversation and detect overlaps, high voice tones or silence times. In addition, thanks to NLP it is possible to analyze the feelings of customers in each intervention, understand how they really feel about products or the service itself and be able to retain customers.
4. Fraud detection and forensic analysis
Finally, speech analytics can improve fraud detection, and minimize losses by identifying when callers use language that is often associated with fraudulent activities.
Similarly, analysis of interactions can be used to detect malpractice, deception or other illegal acts and, as a result, such reports can be used as evidence in legal proceedings to prove a particular illegal or criminal act.
Complete solutions based on speech analytics and conversational intelligence, such as Recordia, allow for an in-depth analysis of all customer interactions with utility contact centers, providing a complete picture of the service situation and the customer’s needs and experiences with it. Find out more about how conversational intelligence can help utility contact centers improve customer experience, ensure service quality and reduce customer churn by clicking here.