Chatbots in energy market – Energy and utilities market is a “service-oriented” business by definition and machine learning-based chatbots can bring this service at maximum levels.
Customer experience and satisfaction for companies operating in this field are as important as the services they provide.
In the Energy market, in particular, customers contact customer service daily to ask for quotations, make payments or check previous bills payment, report service outages and ask for intervention. Simplifying these processes may make the diffference between satisfied and un-satisfied customers, with further impact on companies brand reputation on web and social media, for example.
Furthermore, the introduction of a free energy market increased competition between energy services’ providers and in this scenario, customers’ satisfaction definitely makes the difference.
In particular, artificial intelligence solutions like chatbots can take care of customer service issues by easily handling customers’ requests’ volume, by simulating a one-to-one conversation, available around-the-clock.
chatbots in energy market: sorgenia pre-sales chatbot
Chatbots in energy market – Sorgenia is the first Italian Digital Energy Company that has integrated digital technology in the business strategy since 2016.
From over a year, the company’s customer care strategy integrates a pre-sales and customer care AI chatbot that handles customers’ inbound requests, supports forms’ filing, makes up-selling and cross-selling actions, generates leads and supports call center agents, in case of conversation’s handover, providing answers’ suggestions.
Alessandro Bertoli, Sorgenia Customer Service & ICT Director shows evidences of how the pre-sales chatbot, powered by CRAFTER.AI, is helping the company facing current energy market challenges and building up their relationship with customers.
What are the big challenges for an Energy company today? How do you plan to face them?
“Our company’s challenges and goals are linked to the transition of production towards renewable and sustainable energies; in a complementary way, we aim to build a new ecosystem and a new relationship with customers that are protagonists of a distributed network of production, storage and services related to energy, that go beyond commodities and use digital technology as an fundamental asset for the overall functionality of this ecosystem. For Sorgenia, this is an acceleration and confirmation of our company’s strategy that is already underway”.
Our production’s system mixes our gas and steam combined cycle plants (that is indispensable and enabling in this transition phase), with the growing volume of energy produced from renewable sources that result from internal development projects and achievements and from targeted acquisitions: photovoltaic, wind, biomass, geothermal and water.
The relationship with our customers is increasingly digital, omnichannel and based on a strong environmental awareness and imprint. Also, on our web, social media and mobile applications are growing “Prosumers” communities and “Greeners” customers that have environmental sustainability at heart”.
In consideration of digital UX increasing importance, how Sorgenia guarantees the quality of user experience to customers?
“The quality of UX is essential to create a relationship based on Sorgenia’s simplicity, personalization, sustainability and sharing of the energy service. In order to be able to transmit and share these significant elements, we used the methodology of “design thinking” to design the UX path.
Today we continue with a Customer Experience team that uses Agile methodology to promote digital channels and work to guarantee consistency in view of services’ offer’s expansion, engagement’s increase on environmental sustainability issues, customer profiling and UX personalization.
The results of this process of UX continuous evolution are aligned to the challenging objectives we need to pursue and to the improvement of our customers’ satisfaction, that is also favoured by services’ costs reduction that also enables new business opportunities. “
What is the role of chatbots in your strategy?
“Chatbots are increasingly important channels for UX, providing support on existing channels, like web sales for example, and working as a separate channel to meet customers’ information and dispositive needs. The chatbot guarantees a 24/7 service and immediate response time to customer needs, contributing to customer’s satisfaction increase and decrease of number of interventions of call center operators.
An integrated design on processes and systems is essential to achieve these results as well as a chatbot that natively enables learning, that is equipped with artificial intelligence that allows dialogue customization at a high level of conversation and integrates basic conversation skills.
We are aware that the interface level will have to be furtherly improved, as well as the chat level will naturally evolve to voice interaction.
This also has an impact on the skills we need to manage the chatbot and, as well as in other areas, professionalism and collaboration roles are born between human and artificial intelligence: a sort of tutor that helps chatbots to evolve. “
Why did you choose CRAFTER.AI ?
We have considered several solutions and the one most in line with our goals and strategy turned out to be CRAFTER.AI
All in all, we have focused on its brain “quality” and “quantity” capabilities, in terms of number of intents and particularly on the easy processes and dialogues’ customization, as it is essential for us to interact directly with our chatbot tutors and business people, instead of IT developers.
Finally, we considered the possibilities and capabilities of integration and interaction with our CRM systems with which the CRAFTER.AI chatbot must interface.
We have started, by integrating the chatbot in the pre-sale area, that has allowed us to improve the success rate of new customers activation and now we are gradually extending it to the post-sale phase of Customer management.”
Thanks Alessandro. From our side, we are proud to contribute to Sorgenia’s consolidated success and particularly to Sorgenia’s customers’ satisfaction.
Source:
https://energycentral.com/c/cc/how-utilities-are-using-chatbots-improve-customer-care
https://offertacasa.sorgenia.it/offertacasa/simulazione.html
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