Case Study
SECO Energy Reduces their Cost per Call by 66% with an AI Virtual Agent
At-a-Glance
SECO Energy is an electric cooperative, serving more than 220,000 homes and businesses in Central Florida. When choosing a conversational AI partner, they had two primary requirements: maintain a high-level of customer satisfaction and meet the expectations of always-available, fast and reliable service. SECO Energy partnered with SmartAction to implement an Intelligent Virtual Agent that would automate their most common and repetitive service and support call types.
Success by the Numbers
Cost per Call
Challenge
SECO Energy is an electric cooperative, serving more than 220,000 homes and businesses in Central Florida. SECO has repeatedly achieved “Highest in Customer Satisfaction among Cooperatives” ranking in the “Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study” conducted annually by J.D. Power and Associates.
SECO Energy had two primary goals when they put out an RFP for a conversational AI partner: maintain a high-level of customer satisfaction; and meet the expectations of always-available, fast and reliable service. To reach these goals, SECO selected SmartAction as its vendor of choice for automated customer service. In choosing SmartAction from among the many options, SECO especially valued SmartAction’s AI-powered virtual agent and its ability to handle both simple and complex conversations in the same way their human agents would. This cutting-edge capability lets SECO automate several of their most common and repetitive service and support call types with Conversational AI.
Solution
SECO Energy uses SmartAction in several applications, including:
- Intelligent Front Door: Answers calls, 24/7/365, with a “How can I help you?” greeting. A customer can say whatever they want, be understood, and have their words processed correctly to get them the resolution they’re seeking
- Authentication: Automates customer verification and predicts the intent for the customer’s call
- Account management: Gathers data to update, change a customer’s account as requested, including stopping and transferring service
- Report Outages: Captures a variety of customers information to locate the home, building or area where power is out
Results
SECO and their customers enjoyed the benefits of AI-powered self-service, including:
- A high level of containment (calls completed by IVA without a live agent)
- An always-available, frictionless service and support experience
- CSAT on par with live agents
- 32% call volume deflection
- 66% reduction in cost per call .
Fast Forward a Few Years…
The Telco Migration
After several years of partnership with SmartAction, SECO made a change to their contact center platform. SECO executives feared that during the time of this transition from one telco provider to another service interruptions might occur and cause customer confusion and dissatisfaction. Partnering closely with the SECO technical team, SmartAction helped ensure a seamless integration with and transition to the new telco provider. Upon completing the integration and testing comprehensively for glitches, the go-live was a complete success with no downtime for SECO customers.
Results Post-migration:
Same results with zero disruptions to customer experience.
