Utilities Leap Ahead with AI Powered Chatbots

In the US energy utility industry, self-service has become a key focus for customer service teams. It offers benefits beyond cost reduction, including providing the modern and intuitive digital experience that customers expect and demand.

However, when it comes to digital experiences, the energy utility industry has been lagging behind other industries. According to JD Power's 2022 US Utility Digital Experience Study, while other industries improved their digital experience scores, the energy utility industry's score dropped by 4 points, returning to 2019 levels. This decline happened during the COVID pandemic when most industries invested heavily in their digital experiences. As a result, utility websites appear outdated compared to other industries.

Since utilities share their customers with those other industries, customer expectations for a digital experience are shaped by those interactions, which leaves utilities with a noticeable gap in the digital CX. It's no wonder that customer service call volumes remain high for utilities and the main channel for customer service, while many other industries have delivered more modern and digital self-service customer support experiences.

Fortunately, utilities can bridge the digital experience gap by leveraging new technologies available today and catch up with modern utility customer experiences. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and chatbots powered by Large Language Models (LLM) offer useful tools for utilities to deliver modern support and customer service experiences in their contact centers, as well as support customer self-service on their websites or mobile apps.

By indexing their website content, utilities can create AI chatbots that customers can interact with to find answers more easily than with traditional chat and navigation based self-service platforms. Effective organization and categorization of website information make it accessible and retrievable by an AI chatbot for customer engagement.

However, it's not as simple as asking the AI to "crawl" the website. AI systems using LLM technology require well-organized and high-quality text content to create a knowledge base for searching and referencing when responding to customer questions. Utilities will need a small team of subject matter experts (SMEs) to assign tags, keywords, and metadata to website content so that the chatbot can quickly and efficiently locate relevant information for customers. While knowledgeable editors and managers are still required, their work can be replicated by the chatbot without the need for a 24/7 group of live operators.

Chatbots leverage AI to process customer questions and use natural language processing techniques to understand the query. They then search the indexed data for relevant responses. LLM models allow customers to refine their questions, similar to interacting with a live operator, but with the advantage of consistency across all customer questions and engagements.

As new content becomes available, utilities can update the chatbot's knowledge base, ensuring customers have access to the latest information through the "always on" digital channel. Utilities benefit from 24/7 chat support and the chatbot's ability to quickly learn from customer interactions. Moreover, chatbots can identify customer sentiment in their questions and responses and recognize impatience and frustration, so that they can seamlessly transition to a live customer service representative when needed.

With advancements in chatbot technology, particularly with Large Language Models like ChatGPT, utilities now have an opportunity to significantly enhance their digital customer experience. Unlike slow technology migrations or long training and support cycles with traditional chat, AI chatbots offer a consistent, immediate, and intuitive digital experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations. Utilities that embrace this new technology can deliver self-service across their operations at a lower cost and with greater consistency than using live operators. By doing so, they can satisfy the needs of current customers while delivering the modern utility customer experience that future generations will demand.