Top Tips for Using Advanced Chatbots to Transform Customer Service Teams

Utilities justifiably have reservations about exposing advanced chatbots powered by Generative AI directly to their customers.  Considering data privacy concerns, stories of hallucinating chatbots, and the lack of utility focused applications, it’s likely too soon for utilities to offer customer facing tools.  But, those challenges shouldn’t discourage Customer Service teams from incorporating Generative AI into their support operations. 

Take a look at these 5 key applications for Advanced Chatbots and Virtual Assistants to reduce cost and increase performance in your Customer Service centers.

• Internal Support for Customer Service Representatives (CSR)

  • Replace expensive and ineffective knowledge base tools that frustrate your agents with a well trained chatbot to tackle CSR questions from customers.  Train a chatbot with transcripts of customer calls, disposition data, policies and procedures, and web content to give CSRs instant access to correct and consistent information to provide to customers. CSRs deliver quicker resolution of customer questions and reduce time agents waste searching for information in outdated knowledge base tools.

• Training and Simulations

  • Virtual Assistants powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) amplify the effectiveness of training by simulating more realistic scenarios, which helps agents to practice and hone critical skills like listening and attention to detail, empathy, and providing clear and correct resolution to customer inquiries.  Agents trained with AI simulators improve speed to proficiency and mastery that customers appreciate.

• Quality Assurance and Coaching

  • Improve the speed and effectiveness of QA and agent coaching by training AI on transcripts from customer calls.  Advanced chatbots quickly learn the trends in positive outcomes of past successful calls, and can spot deviations or challenges in new calls in order to tag low performing calls and prompt CSR teams with effective coaching advice.  Team managers use these insights to increase coaching activities and improve agent effectiveness.

• Feedback and Survey Analysis

  • Generative AI powers analysis of customer survey responses not just for topics, but can even spot sentiment to highlight events that need extra attention or “closed loop” support.  Survey analysis creates useful data faster and delivers insights to managers and executives to spot issues earlier and provide corrective action to improve the customer experience

• Voice Recognition and Speech Analysis

  • Advanced chatbots can be trained to listen to customer calls and provide agents with insights on customer tone, sentiment, and emotion during the call to improve their listening and empathy skills.  Agents can receive real time transcription of calls to improve their attention to detail and avoid asking customers to repeat information.  Chat provides an extra set of ears on a call that improves agent efficiency and leads to more one-call resolutions.

Advanced chatbots with Generative AI features offer utilities a range of innovative and exciting tools to improve the performance of the CSRs who talk and work directly with their customers. Chatbots trained on utility policies and programs give CSRs extra advantages in understanding customer needs and resolving customer issues more quickly and effectively right from the first call.  These new platforms improve performance in the contact center by reducing handle time, improving first call resolution, and increasing CSAT. Customers appreciate brief, clear and concise handling of their questions and challenges, so these advanced chatbots help CSRs improve the reputation and credibility of the utility in their customers eyes.  Along with streamlining back office operation, improving training and Quality Assurance, and giving more time to managers for coaching and staff development, chatbots provide ample benefits to utilities to consider implementing these tools in their customer service centers.

We consider AI a transformational technology that when applied correctly and safely can dramatically improve performance for utility customer service operations.  Training an advanced chatbot in the safe and controlled environment of a customer service center, where trained agents and experienced leaders can monitor and evaluate its performance helps utilities reduce risk and improve performance more safely than a customer facing chatbot.  Many of these solutions pay for themselves through efficiency and performance optimization and should be a consideration for every Customer Service team in 2024.  

If you have questions or would like to learn more about Chatbot projects for utilities or get help with your current project, please let us know.  We’re always happy to help.

Image in this article generated by DALL-E a generative AI tool from OpenAI.