Tis the Season: 2024 Utility Industry Predictions

Tis the season for much holiday merriment and prognostications for the future.  In the year ahead, we predict 2024 will be the year utilities seriously experiment with AI, just not in customer facing applications.

1. Advanced Chatbots Helping Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) Deliver Value to Customers

2. AI and Machine Learning Extract Sentiment and Advanced Analytics from Voice of the Customer Surveys

3. Generative AI in the Communications Group to Amp Up Helpful Content for Customers

Advanced Chatbots Helping Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) Deliver Value to Customers: Throw away your outdated, confusing and inefficient knowledge base tools.  Give Customer Service teams a well trained AI-Chatbot to answer customer questions quickly, accurately and consistently every time.  Chatbots helping CSRs helps utilities reduce handle time, increase CSR productivity, and improve First Call Resolutions.  Add reduced training time and accelerated CSR speed to proficiency, and AI-Chatbots deliver lasting value that customers appreciate.

AI and Machine Learning Extract Sentiment and Advanced Analytics from Voice of the Customer Surveys:  Almost every utility still publishes a book of verbatim feedback from customers often scored by team members to deliver insights above and beyond the NPS style 10-point scores.  Few utilities have true text analytics.  Almost no utility captures diverse sentiment from customers across multiple listening posts in their VoC ecosystem.  Unleash the power of Machine Learning and AI for pattern recognition and text analytics to discover deep insights, especially customer sentiment, from virtually every survey interaction.  AI powered VoC insights not only gives you more data about your utility does well or not from the customers’ perspective, but these tools can tell you how important each detail is across the entire customer lifecycle.  Armed with the additional detail and insight, utilities make better decisions about how and where to invest to improve the utility CX.

Generative AI in the Communications Group to Amp Up Helpful Content for Customers: Giving a communications group a helpful Large Language Model chatbot like ChatGPT, and some training in prompt engineering, is like adding a research team and a couple of copywriters.  With a bit of training, a good communications person can amplify the volume and quality of helpful content for the website, customer engagement, press releases and special campaigns like Energy Efficiency, EVs and charging, or DR and TOU launches.   ChatGPT helps with research, outlines and content development to increase volume and quality while decreasing the time required to get content from idea to publication. 

Utilities implementing any or all of these AI projects will benefit from a safe, affordable, and responsive pilot to test and learn this exciting new technology already disrupting virtually every industry.  Time to embrace AI, but in the right format and application that fits our industry’s culture.

The image at the header of this article was created using DALL-E, a product of OpenAI.