SRP improves Self-Service Rates by More than Double

Challenges

SRP provides electricity to nearly 1 million customers in Arizona. As air conditioner use spikes during the hot March-October peak season, so does the influx of customer calls.

Previously, only 23% of customers used SRP’s traditional interactive voice response (IVR) system. Of those who did, most ended up being routed to a live agent due to the IVR’s limited, transactional functionality. As a result, each peak season SRP had to dramatically ramp up costly live agent hires to handle increased call volumes.

SRP needed a solution that could handle more than two million calls per year while also:

• Supporting the company goal of being industry forward with customer-friendly initiatives
• Reducing reliance on seasonal live agents
• Initiating proactive outage confirmations via self-service
• Enabling quick access to agents when needed to handle critical issues, such as outages

Solutions

SRP partnered with Interactions to develop Rosie (for English) and Ramón (for Spanish) – fully automated customer care applications that make self-service easier by enabling customers to speak in their own words. This fully conversational experience is made possible by Interactions patented Adaptive Understanding™ technology, which utilizes multiple recognition resources to provide the highest level of accuracy possible.

To develop the solution, Interactions asked SRP, “What does your ideal call look like?” for outage confirmations, bill payment, and other common scenarios. Interactions then customized automated solutions that can easily handle these tasks, so live agents are free to focus on more urgent or complex calls.

Since Interactions solutions are flexible enough to add capacity when needed, SRP is now able to easily manage monthly call spikes during peak season. In fact, over 110,000 calls per month are contained during peak season, reducing the reliance on live agents.

Results

By working with Interactions, SRP has dramatically increased containment and reduced the need for seasonal live agents. They’re also furthering their company goals of being an industry leader in customer-friendly service. It all adds up to big cost savings and happier customers.

• Twice the rate of self-service. Customer self-service increased from 22-39% since SRP started using their customer-friendly and flexible Interactions Virtual Assistant.
• Improved customer experience. The Intelligent Virtual Assistant provides customers with a friendly and flexible self-service option, which is in line with SRP’s commitment to delivering superior CSAT scores.
• 24% of callers successfully complete their transaction via self-service. This reduced the number of calls transferred to live agents, and improved customer experience and satisfaction.
• 48% containment for outage notifications. One of SRP’s most common call types is now significantly contained without the need for live agent assistance.