Digital
customer carein the age of AI
Energy service providers
must adapt to risingcustomer expectations“The last best experiencethat anyone has anywhere,
becomes the minimum
expectation for the experience
they want everywhere.”Paul Papas
IBM Global Leader for Interactive Experience1Content

1. Boostingcustomer carecustomers have
2. Yourembraced everything
digital—have you?

does AI have to do
3. Whatwith customer care?

can AI do for
4. Whatcompanies today?

customer care
5. Theevolution starts here

Click to navigate

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Boostingcustomer care
Customer care is becoming a differentiator
across all industries—and the energy andutility industry is no exception. They are being
challenged to revitalize and personalize theircustomer interactions while controlling costs.
To compete, companies need to build client
centricity throughout their organization, know
their customers as individuals, and provide
personalized and proactive care across manychannels, when and where customers want.
But providing this level of customer careis challenging. According to a recent IDC
Futurescape study, only 1 in 5 utilities will raisecustomer satisfaction scores by more than 10%
or reach a positive net promoter score in 2018.
When paired together, customer engagement
analytics and AI-infused virtual assistants(chatbots) can help provide a superior level of
personalized customer service when and where
your customers want to communicate. AI will
help cut costs, automate rote queries, and freecustomer care reps to focus on higher valueinteractions, making for happier customers,
employees, and businesses.

“Our vision is that
customers will be able
to interact with us
the way that they want
to interact with us.”
Gregory Knight
Chief Customer Officer and Senior VP,
CenterPoint Energy3Your customers
have embraced
everything digital—
have you?
Customers today are highly demanding,increasingly connected, and have heightened
expectations for engagement. They expect
to get answers quickly, at any time, on any
channel they choose, so they can move onquickly with their lives.
How fast? Among people who contact a brand,
product, or company through social media forcustomer support, 32% expect a response
within 30 minutes. Nearly half expect a
response in an hour.1 Facebook recommends
15-minute response times from brands in its
Messenger app.2
And energy service providers are not immune
to these expectations. People openly compare
their energy service providers with companies
in other industries like retail, travel, andmedia.3 In other words, that customer whojust bought a pair of shoes on Amazon in one
click or ordered a car service via a smartphone
app is going to demand the same level ofengagement from their energy service provider.

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50% of customer calls gounresolved or require escalation.

52% of customers hang up ona customer service call before
their issue is resolved.

As digital, social, and mobile technologies
become increasingly important, companies
are challenged with showing they are morethan just commodity energy providers. They’rebattling it out for consumers’ hearts and minds.
While the demands are high, the rewards
can be even bigger.
Satisfied customers are more engaged anddrive down the overall cost-to-serve.
In competitive energy markets, loyal customers
help build a profitable business because they
are more likely to stay with a utility that treats
them well, more likely to recommend it toothers, and are more likely to buy additional
services, further boosting their lifetime value.
Providing poor customer service—the kindthat immediately sends customers to social
media to complain—is not an option.

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Energy and utilities globally
spend USD 30 billion a year
on customer operations, witha large portion going to billingand call centers.

The customer carestruggles of energy
service providers today
Energy service providers have uniquedemands. They must both handle mundane
queries and respond promptly when people
ask about technical failures, extreme weather
events, or grid imbalances.4

Studies show that the average cost per
customer service interaction over thephone ranges from USD 5 to USD 12.
Virtual agents bring this cost down 80%
to USD 1.55 per interaction.9

With customers spending just an average of
10 minutes a year communicating with utility
providers, smart companies will customize ashort, efficient and well-targeted journey tomake those 10 minutes as painless as possible.5

Virtual agents not only lower costs but
also lead to improved customer and agent
satisfaction. As reported by Aberdeen
CEM Executive’s Agenda 2017 study,
companies that have adopted messaging
as a customer service channel achieve a
2.9 times greater annual increase in NPS10
compared to “all others”.

Most customer care solutions, however, areslow to respond due to aging technology andrely solely on interactive response systems
and human agents.
Navigating Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
trees is more often than not cumbersome
and, compared to normal digital interactions,
can lead to more frustration. Customer
service is still fragmented, and multichannel
conversations can quickly become broken.6

Additionally, research has foundthat employee engagement rates also
increase as virtual agents makeservice agents jobs easier.

Hiring more people isn’t a solution that canscale. It costs around USD 8,400 to recruit andonboard a new hire.7 And these costs add up
as agents spend an average of only one year on
the job due to stress and frustrations.8

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What does AI have to
do with customer care?
Companies need to take the strain off ofhuman agents and tap into clients’ individual
contexts—adapt to them—and gain instantaccess to customer preferences, pastqueries, and other relevant data. That’s
where digital agents (such as chat bots)
infused with artificial intelligence come in.
These solutions use machine learning tointervene and act as the first step toward
completely personalized interactions between
companies and their customers.
AI infused virtual agents can cut labor costs by
reducing the reliance on human intervention—
leading to as much as 30% decline in customer
support service fees. Chatbots can also handle
80% of routine tasks and customer questions.
Unlike people, chatbots are not constrainedby working hours, time zones, public holidays,or illness. They’re always on—even during
weather disasters—and this gives companies
the ability to deliver truly always-on service
that further increases satisfaction and loyalty.

Did you know:– 80% of routine customer
questions can be handled
by chatbots.
– USD 8 billion could be savedby using chatbots.
– 90% success rate of bot
interactions by 2022.

The future of customer careis conversational: mobile
messaging and chatbots are
preferred by customers and are
up to four times more efficientthan legacy voice channels.

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Forrester Researchpredicts that blended AI
tools will “help improvesales outcomes and reduce
customer-servicing costs.”

Focus on your client:
AI-enabled customer care
In most cases, digital assistants infused with
AI drive three key imperatives:–– Improving UX–– Lowering OPEX–– Generating new revenue streams
Estimates show that natural language
processing integration in chatbots willsave companies USD 8 billion per year in
supporting costs by 2020, as opposed to just
USD 20 million in 2017.11
AI-infused chatbots can predict why a person
is reaching out and can offer resolutions even
before a complaint is filed. This is useful forprocedures as simple as payments and billing
disputes resolution, account set up, or discountclaims. And these interactions can be utility
specific, such as power outages alerts, weather
notifications, cataclysm alarms, or blue-sky
equipment failure notices.
AI-infused chatbots recognize and adapt tocontext and intent; they come equipped witha degree of emotional intelligence that allows
them to differentiate sentiments and tone, caninfer personality traits and deliver a thoroughly
customized experience, all while escalating tohuman agents when necessary.

8AI augments
human agentsThe big bet with AI-powered conversational
agents and self-service solutions is that they
may eliminate the hassle of calling support
for every little issue, thus making large
call-centers unnecessary while increasing
customer satisfaction and engagement or still
lowering churn rates by augmenting the workof current care agents.12 This means happierclients and 30% in savings in your customer
care budget.13
A digital agent also offloads some of the morestressful and tedious activities that result inagent attrition. Not only are these agents on
the front line of dealing with often irate andimpatient customers, much of their time can bespent answering trivial or mundane questions,and often the same ones over and over.
Shuffle these routine questions off to
AI-powered conversational agent, and thehuman agent is under less pressure, and getsto tackle the more intellectually challenging
questions—the kind that make their job
feel more valuable and sparks exceptionalcustomer care.

– 85% of all customer
interactions will behandled without a humanagent by 2020.
– For every second
companies shorten callcenter handling times, over
USD 1 million is saved inannual service costs.
– Chatbots reduce per-querycosts from USD 5–12 withhuman agents to just
USD 1 with virtual agents.

IBM Voice Gateway enables
Watson to listen to whata customer and agent are
discussing and uses the IBM
Watson Discovery Service to findappropriate internal documents,
web pages, processes andforms to answer the customer’squeries. This alleviates theagent’s burden to searchthrough large volumes of dataand information. By connecting
to Watson, a call center is alsoable to do a sentiment analysis,
improving the quality of calls.
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Named the leader in
Forrester’s New Wave report on
Conversational Computing—
IBM Watson Assistantis the AI for your business.
Download report

Use data to understandyour customers
Integrating digital agents with multiple data
sources inside and outside an organization
provides a holistic customer view. And when
they integrate with CRM and other criticalsystems, they can seamlessly coordinate
workflows, handling multiple complex tasks
across several systems.
And paired with the ability to learn fromeach interaction, digital agents can engage
in contextual discussions and offer targeted
resolutions faster than call center agents could
ever do on their own.
With AI, companies can understand who theircustomers are and what they want before they
dial their support number. Social listening, calllogs, and audio files are just part of the vast
data pool that can be harvested to help themunderstand what types of services customers
want to purchase, what kinds of problems they
may be having, or learn how to build a trusting
relationship with them. It’s like adding the voiceof their customers into their back-end systems.

One key area where energy service providers
can leverage the full potential of a multichannel customer engagement platform isimproving enrollment for programs that aredesigned to help customers save energy andlower bills.
Internal subject matter experts are also
adding their own database of knowledge tothe mix, as well as supervising the continuing
training of the algorithm to continue to finetune the solution’s familiarity with customer
vocabularies and continue to get smarter andfaster over time.

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So how do you train AI
to help companies?
Properly training virtual agents enables them tobe fluent in several international languages in amatter of days. The most efficient chatbots areequipped with a holistic understanding ofbrand-specific and industry-specific knowledge
and are pre-configured to handle the mostcommon requests.
All bots need to be trained on data sets specificto what they do. Truly functional bots will be
integrated with other systems to improve theircapabilities. For energy service providers, these
could be the customer, marketing, and outage
systems where the chatbot could personalizeinteractions by accessing a customer’s billing
data and completing their payment.

“We think the conversational
agent will have the mostvalue when it can delve
into what’s behind thequestion you asked. It’s
the idea of incorporating a
discovery process into theconversational system.”

The AI-powered conversational
agents can address up to
80% of commonly asked Tier 1
support questions.

Rob High
IBM Watson CTO

11What can AI do forcompanies today?
Intelligence put to workwith Watson®
Customer service powered by AI technology
provides a level of reliability that cannot bematched by human agents alone.

“Not all bots are createdequal. Simple bots arebasically rules based. AI
can help make chatbot
conversations morehuman-like and understandthe complexities of language
and learn how to engage
in more naturalconversations that identify
and resolve problems.”
Vickie Dorris
IBM solutions leader in
global digital customer care12Less humaninterference
Watson uses technologies such as natural
language processing, deep learning andmachine learning to make sense of userquestions and to imitate human speech
and reactions to the point that actual humanintervention is required only for the mostcomplex of tasks. When a human touch is
required, the solution can easily escalate andtransfer the chat conversation via third-party
services (such as LivePerson, Salesforce,
Genesys, Avaya, or Zendesk).

Dialogue tracing
IBM solutions can easily trace dialogues
and allow for a more natural conversation.
When users digress from the conversation,
the discussion can be easily resumed from
where it stopped, so none of the previous
dialogue is lost.

Decision-making
assistance
Using improved metrics and analytics, IBM
solutions can understand the interaction
between users and virtual assistants andcan assist with a myriad of decisions. This isfacilitated by a set of core skills, categorized
by reasoning technology: conversation,
discovery, classification, and more.

Quick resolution
The technology that powers AI-infused virtual
agents enables the fast recognition of morethan 60 use cases and, by understanding andprocessing intent, context and meaning behind
queries, customer response is sped up by 99%
and resolution time is diminished from10 minutes to seconds for most inquiries. 14
With Bradesco, one of Brazil’s largest banks,
Watson is trained on 62 products and answers
283,000 questions a month with a 95%
accuracy rate, with just 5% requiring calls forfurther assistance. “It’s a real wow factor”,
exclaimed one Bradesco manager.

Multi-channel
efficiencies
Since 42% of B2B customers purchasemore after a positive customer experience,15
IBM products focus on creating customer
self-service and agent assist solutions
to support both proactive and responsive
customer interactions across multiple
channels. Our solutions expand tomobile chat, apps, cognitive kiosks,
and other channels as desired.

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We can augment all channels
with AI (including voice), andCognitive Async Messaging
to yield the most results
Vehicle,
Phone

IVR

STT/TTS

Voice virtual agent
Cognitive
agent assist
Voice human agent

Speech Assistant(Google Assistant,Alexa)

Offer digital option
or auto-detect whenlogged into digital

Web, SMS,Apple Bus Chat,
Messenger, In-App

Async messaging
virtual agent
Cognitive
agent assist
Async messaging
human agent

Actively deflect calls to messaging whencustomers prefer to be served in digital,
where CSAT and efficiency are the highest.

Use real-time sentiment analytics for optimal
customer experience (Bot—Human tango,
personalization).

Identify top intents driving your volume
and develop a cognitive roadmap to enable
them with AI, with seamless agent handoffs
as needed.

Add Cognitive Agent Assist to help
agents speed up knowledge searchfor complex inquiries.

Leverage Asynchronous Messaging to movebeyond “the session” to enable services
on customers’ time table, with up to 2X
efficiency over voice.

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The customer careevolution starts here
To meet customer expectations and provide thepersonalized “every, anytime” services
they crave, companies need to engage themas individuals with fast, proactive, andreliable information.
While such an approach might provechallenging, energy service providers are
opening up to the fact that adapting to the newenvironment is the only way to go forward.16
Ultimately, as customers and technology
become more sophisticated, energy service
providers will need a base level of consumer andindustrial marketing capabilities that include
greater expertise in customer intelligence,
product, and service marketing, channel
management, and core customer service
delivery models.17
Developing a broader, multi-channel platform
for customer communications is one of thesmartest investments that can be made today.18

61% of failed customer support
calls can be solved with better
access to data.

USD 8 billion could be saved byinvesting in AI chatbots.

Learn more

15®IBM Corporation 2018.
IBM, the IBM logo and ibm.com are trademarks ofInternational Business Machines Corp., registeredin many jurisdictions worldwide.
Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies.
A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the
web at “Copyright and trademark information” at
www.ibm.com/legal/us/en/copytrade.shtml
1

www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-research/42-percent-of-consumers-complaining-insocial-media-expect-60-minute-response-time

2

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3

blog.intradiem.com/
customer-service-delivery-utilities-energy

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www.energycentral.com/c/iu/multi-channel-customer-engagement-model-enhances-customer-experience
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6www.genesys.com/resources/blended-ai-for-customer-experience?cid=7010B000001SI7k

7blog.intradiem.com/
customer-service-delivery-utilities-energy

8

www.qatc.org/winter-2015-connection/
exploring-call-center-turnover-numbers

9

blogs.aspect.com/web-chat-faq-average-costsvs-handle-time-and-efficiency

10

blogs.aspect.com/web-chat-faq-averagecosts-vs-handle-time-and-efficiency

11

www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2017/05/chatbots-customer-service-will-help-businessessave-8-billion-per-year

12

www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2017/10/10-reasons-ai-powered-automated-customer-service-future13

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14

ibm.biz/BdYbB9

15

www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2017/10/10-reasons-ai-powered-automated-customer-service-future16

www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/
Strategyand_The-capable-utility-company.pdf

17

www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/
Strategyand_The-capable-utility-company.pdf

18

www.energycentral.com/c/iumulti-channel-customer-engagement-model-enhances-customer-experience

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