Energy provider boosts contact centre capacity by 463% with AI-powered IVR

The Challenge

During a major weather event, over 200,000 of the energy provider's customers lost power due to infrastructure damage, with some outages lasting weeks. This overwhelmed the client's contact centre which was only able to handle 160 concurrent calls through its legacy interactive voice response (IVR) system. At the peak of the event, the contact centre was receiving 160 calls per minute, leading to busy signals, long queues and limited self-service capabilities for callers.

Their traditional dual-tone multi-frequency IVR provided basic text-to-speech voice quality and could not effectively handle the surge in call volumes or provide updated outage information to customers waiting in the queue.

The Solution

To address these challenges, the energy provider partnered with Convai to update their existing contact centre infrastructure technology. Convai implemented Oration, its SaaS conversational artificial intelligence (AI) speech engine, and Genesys Cloud, an omnichannel platform to connect Oration to the client’s contact centre.

Oration's intuitive IVR capabilities could easily identify variations of key caller intents like “the power is out in {suburb_name}” and relay accurate responses over the phone; without the need for a live agent. Genesys Cloud enabled the connection between Oration and the client's outage management system, allowing for real-time updates to be provided to callers already in the queue.