WhatsApp Chatbots Transforming Customer Experience in Utilities Sector

Provide Instant Help— Customer representatives can work within limited hours, but there will always be customers who will come in after hours. During times of crisis, such as a power outage, an unexpected cut-off on the electricity due to an unpaid bill, etc., chatbots can come in to save the day with the instant communication they provide 24/7. Answer Queries— Most of the questions an energy or utility chatbot receives are about technical queries on the services metadialog.com they receive. These can be about registration and deregistration, meter readings, changes they would like to make on their tariffs, past or present invoices, or fault clearances. Utility sector is growing with one of the most impactful step by innovating more into technologies like automation, AI and advanced analytics. A major AI implementation assures the utility sector to discover data-mine, providing them satisfaction of long run in the business.

It further allows utility services to cross-sell other plans to existing customers based on their interactions. The software replies to customers regarding billing assistance, relocation setup inquiries, new plans, promotional offers, and other queries popular in the utility sector. It uses AI to handle seasonal call surges and answers customers’ questions accurately and in a personalized manner. Moreover, it shifts the customers from chat to live calls, if needed, for the best customer service experiences. By analyzing customer data, energy and utilities companies can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences.

Revamp Your Customer Interactions with

Eventually, every person can have a fully functional personal assistant right in their pocket, making our world a more efficient and connected place to live and work. Some chatbots can move seamlessly through transitions between chatbot, live agent, and back again. As AI technology and implementation continue to evolve, chatbots and digital assistants will become more seamlessly integrated into our everyday experience. Startups such as the examples highlighted in this report focus on chatbots, advanced analytics, digital maintenance as well as predictive analytics. While all of these technologies play a major role in advancing utility management, they only represent the tip of the iceberg. To explore more solutions, simply get in touch to let us look into your areas of interest.

• Today, there is no need to spend countless hours responding to leads’ messages, as chatbots do it instantly for you around the clock.
• The utilities sector is increasingly implementing WhatsApp chatbots in order to streamline its customer experience and automate many service offerings.
• On the other hand, this gives you the opportunity to get to know your customers’ language usage and questions and to use them step by step.
• Chatbots can work at any second of any day and can reply to a limitless number of customers in an instant.
• By leveraging NLP, companies can improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and gain valuable insights into their customers.
• This can help energy and utilities companies to better manage their energy resources and reduce energy costs.

Chatbots have become popular as a time and money saver for businesses and an added convenience for customers. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop, chatbots — which use advanced AI and natural language processing — are a tool being used by many types of companies, including utilities. A chatbot is essentially a computer program designed to respond to voice prompts without human intervention. These programs are most useful in situations in which the appropriate responses can be easily predicted. Due to these huge number of parameters to detect anomalies and irregularities, AI technologies, such as machine learning and predictive analytics is the most effective medium here.

Whenwhyhow provides Customer Behavior Analytics

If you are interested in the things chatbots can offer you now and in the future, we invite you to fill out our form by clicking here to start your journey. You can monitor the overall performance of the chatbot via chatbot analytics and figure out what is working and what is not. Unlock insights from data to create the right conversational experiences for customer service. Chatbot analytics continually analyzes conversational experience, uncovering gaps, and suggesting fixes. By upgrading to an automated virtual assistant i.e. a utilities WhatsApp chatbot, providers can reduce time and resources on manual execution of operational activities, saving money and time in the utilities sector.

Implementing conversational AI and automating tasks decreases the amount of time live agents are tied up answering commonly asked questions. This means commonly asked questions will be answered quickly and accurately via IVAs while live agents will have more availability to handle any complex requests that may arise. They can take more calls, more frequently, and thereby, increase the scale of their operations.

Products & Services

Heavy investments in infrastructure and operations in the utilities sector often tend to put customer service in the backseat. In the case of complex queries, a human agent can instantly jump in and take over from the bot, and address the concerns of the customers using bot-to-human handover. Agents can also monitor the bot conversation history allowing them to jump in with the context. This ensures smooth customer-experience resulting in happy, satisfied customers.

For instance, as soon as the chatbot receives an outage-related complaint, it can fetch information from the internal system and update the customer of the current status. This reduces the overall execution time, thereby improving customer satisfaction. The Fortune 100 company works across the energy industry in generation, sales, and transmission. With six utilities chatbots for utilities including Atlantic City Electric, BGE, ComEd,  Delmarva, PECO and  Pepco, Exelon has the delivers electricity and natural gas to about 10 million customers across the East Coast and in Illinois. Many of them were button-based and guided users through predefined flows. The origin of the chatbot arguably lies with Alan Turing’s 1950s vision of intelligent machines.

Energy Central

All chatbot transmissions are encrypted, and we use the best tools to ensure data privacy. It becomes difficult for the customer to manage countless unorganized bills of the utilities sector. As a result, customers struggle to review utilities bill, modify account details, and analyse pending payments. In the present scheme of things in the utilities sector, an onboarded customer is often left confused about the workings of the utilities provided and how to benefit from them in an organised setup. This confusion and a lack of direct access to information restrict the optimal usage of resources.

Testing means playing with the UX of the bot, while training means testing the semantic understanding of the bot. To make the bot more robust, you need to confront it with potential end users to ensure that most recurring patterns have been identified and covered. Customers can also sign up to receive personalized notifications for things like available invoices, payment due dates, and high usage rates.

How AI is Transforming Energy and Utilities Customer Service

Chatbots, while very useful, shouldn’t be viewed as a panacea for customer care. So, consider at what point a human should become involved, or how customers can enjoy a chatbot-free experience if they prefer. On the other hand, this gives you the opportunity to get to know your customers’ language usage and questions and to use them step by step. A new feature that customers are becoming increasingly aware of—is how well their utility company encourages energy conservation.

• However, the most advanced capabilities of current chatbots can go above and beyond.
• Chatbots are being used to automate customer service tasks such as answering frequently asked questions, providing product information, and processing orders.
• The startup’s AI-based assistant enables residential customers to participate in peak load, rebates, or other energy-related programs and offers a white-label communication extension to the energy services.
• The one-to-one communication guaranteed by the instant messaging service is able to dedicate a unique and original type of communication to each contact, encouraging customer loyalty.
• By analyzing customer data, energy and utilities companies can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences.
• The software replies to customers regarding billing assistance, relocation setup inquiries, new plans, promotional offers, and other queries popular in the utility sector.

That means treating customers well and being responsive to their needs is just as important as the flow of water, electricity, natural gas, wastewater or internet service. Surprised that an electric utility is on the cutting edge of chatbot innovation? You shouldn’t be, since it’s not the industry you’re in that drives what customers expect. Another approach to implementing chatbots involves integrating the technology in social channels like Whatsapp.

Customer Is The King! But Are We Slaves?

A study conducted by Tata Consultancy Services, reports that 0.53% of average company revenue of the utilities are expected to be invested in AI. The investments in AI have shown cost savings and revenue improvement in business. Chatbots are not the only application area of AI but also the insights derived from the analytics of consumer data are a big treasure for the utility business. All this combined helps utilities to build business strategies targeted to create delightful customer experiences. For example, chatbots can equally play a role in field service enablement, providing more intelligent and versatile automation to field service workflows.

Making such shifts to technological aids have resulted in operational efficiencies. Several problems have been solved with such invasions, such as handling annoyed customers with quick resolution to their issues. Reducing the staff in call centers and thus, reducing the operational costs, understanding common concerns of the customers, etc. Gaining insights on customer expectations and behavior acts as a pearl in the ocean. This lays down the path of strategic business decisions and aids in defining ways to improve customer service.

How to choose the best test for your AI chatbot

Since most chatbots use messaging apps already on billions of phones around the world, there are chances your customers are already connected and ready for your bot. A chatbot is artificial intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a conversation (or chat) with a user in natural language via messaging applications, websites, mobile apps, or over the phone. Generally speaking, chatbots do not have a history of being used for hacking purposes. Chatbots are conversational tools that perform routine tasks efficiently. The original chatbot was the phone tree, which led phone-in customers on an often cumbersome and frustrating path of selecting one option after another to wind their way through an automated customer service model. Enhancements in technology and the growing sophistication of AI, ML, and NLP evolved this model into pop-up, live, onscreen chats.