Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service To Transform Customer Engagement For Energy And Utilities Companies

Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview 20 representatives from 16 organizations across eight industries and conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to better understand the benefits associated with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.¹­

In the full TEI study, Forrester projected that an industry-agnostic composite organization would see risk-adjusted operating income growth of between $33.6 million and $169.0 million over three years, which is driven by increased top of the funnel engagement, conversion rates, and reduced churn. Over the same three-year period, the composite organization is also projected to recognize between $12.3 million and $28.4 million in cost savings due to increased employee productivity.

This abstract will focus on the energy and utilities sector’s use of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and its value to their organizations.

As part of the broader TEI study, Forrester interviewed two representatives from energy organizations:

• A senior director at a retail energy company with 18,000 employees.
• A manager of enterprise automation at a utilities company with 10,000 employees.

Customer satisfaction is crucial for energy companies, especially those with retail and customer-facing operations. Failure to meet customer expectations can lead to regulatory intervention or the loss of a license to operate. One way to manage customer expectations is through contact center organizations, which handle customer calls regarding service issues, emergencies, and energy bills.

Before implementing Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, the interviewees’ energy companies often faced challenges in adapting customer expectations and improving customer experiences. Customers increasingly expect personalized experiences, quick problem-solving, and easy access to information. However, the interviewees’ energy companies struggled with overburdened contact center agents, resulting in a suboptimal customer experience when calling in.

Generative AI (genAI) introduces the possibility for energy organizations to evolve their contact center operations. According to Forrester Research, access to genAI tools increased contact center agent productivity (in terms of resolutions per hour) by 14% alongside other benefits like improved customer sentiment, reduced supervisor escalation, and lower agent attrition.²

To that end, interviewees in the energy and utilities space shared how introducing Azure OpenAI Service use cases into their contact center operations made the most sense. By adopting Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, interviewees created time and cost savings for their support organization, allowing contact center agents to focus on more complex calls. This directly impacted customer perception and overall customer experience in engaging with these companies.

INVESTMENT DRIVERS

The interviewees’ organizations adopted Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to find ways of continuously improving their customer engagement processes. Some of the challenges related to customer engagement that energy companies struggled with include:

• Suboptimal customer experience with potential direct impact on profitability. Interviewees shared that companies in their space commonly struggled with customer experience (CX). Forrester research found that across 25 of the largest utilities brands in the US, the average CX score experienced a three-year downward trend from 66 to 63.4 on a 100-point scale.³ The manager at a utilities company told Forrester that for their industry, bad customer experiences can significantly impact their company’s financials: “As a utility company, we’re regulated. We’re often the only utility in a particular geography or region. Our profitability is based on the delight of our customers. Regulators pay attention to that [so] if we provide bad experience to our customers, they will step in.”
• Significant inefficiencies for contact center agents exacerbated by long call times and high turnover. Part of the challenge in improving customer experience is suboptimal contact center operations. Agents are often overburdened with not only the number of calls, but the additional manual and mundane tasks they also have to complete. The senior director at the retail energy company said: “The way our agents would do contact logs or summarize the calls is to actually type it up during the call. That means during the call the agent can be distracted because they are taking notes. As the customer, that causes pauses in the conversation that are not benefitting me in terms of my experience on the phone.”
  This in turn impacted the level of turnover that happened at the interviewees’ organizations’ contact centers. The manager of enterprise automation at a utilities company shared: “There is a large amount of turnover because it’s grunt work. You are consistently listening to people complaining. You need to access different materials on a regular basis, [and yet] some of the information you find is out of date.”

Key Results

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

Increased contact center agent empowerment and productivity. Interviewees shared that their use of Azure OpenAI Service improved contact center operations. Their organizations’ chatbots could create summaries of conversation transcripts instantly, saving agents time and creating more accurate and consistent notes that could be used for downstream analytics. These chatbots could provide personalized recommendations to a human agent or even answer customer questions faster and accurately, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues.

• The senior director at the retail energy company noted: “We are also helping our agents determine next best action. That could be anything going on with the account. Maybe your credit card expired. It could give us an opportunity to offer you other offers. The agent has all this information by just going to one screen.”
• The manager of enterprise automation at the utilities company elaborated on how time savings were realized by having chatbots support their agents: “By having a chatbot, [contact center agents] do not have to spend hours looking for information themselves. The chatbot, together with our RPA [robotic process automation], would go to different data sources and bring the most updated information back to our agents. I estimate that to be a 25% to 30% efficiency gain. Then, there would be a more significant uptick as we expand the use case to other people and departments.”
• The same manager also shared that with the recaptured free time, contact center agents focused on the more complex calls, adding: “If a customer calls with a high bill, an agent can go through various steps to understand the reason why. Once they understand that, they can take the appropriate course of action.”

*For the composite organization presented in the full TEI study

Increased customer engagement content creation. In addition to the contact center agents, interviewees also reported that implementing Azure OpenAI Service enabled time savings related to content generation. When applied to sales and marketing teams, this use case allowed the interviewees’ energy organizations to generate content drafts or variations of existing content in a far simpler manner.

The manager at the retail energy company said: “Our sales and commercial teams are using [Azure OpenAI Service] to extract information from emails and documents and create deal sheets. [Compared to the legacy environment], it’s been saving them anywhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours.”

Increased customer satisfaction. As a result of the productivity gain across different roles and departments, interviewees shared their belief that by using Azure OpenAI Service, they improved the overall customer engagement experience.

• The senior director at the retail energy company noted: “One of the things we’re looking at doing is creating a unified view that tells us this customer has already talked to this person about this, so the next thing to talk to the customer about is that. We want to drive more efficient calls and smarter outcomes for agents that translate to better customer experience and lifetime value.”
• The manager at the utilities company added: “One [use case] we’re evaluating is to help predict the health of assets on the grid and likelihood of an outage occurring. If we can prevent those service interruptions, we can avoid a percentage of customers calling into an already stressed call center, which as a whole should improve customer satisfaction.”

*For the composite organization presented in the full TEI study

• The improvement in customer satisfaction likely would have direct impact on financial results and overall profitability. Forrester research found that customers that feel valued were more likely to be loyal.⁴ Among American utilities customers who feel happy, 68% planned to purchase additional optional program, 73% planned to seek more expertise from the company, and 83% planned to advocate for that vendor.⁵

APPENDIX A: ENDNOTES