How a major utility cut cost per conversation by 58% and absorbed outage surges without a war room

• Industry: Energy & Utilities 

• Size: 70 support agents, roughly 180,000 conversations a month 

• Channels: WhatsApp, web chat, email

• Cost per conversation: down 58% 

• Resolved automatically: 76% of conversations 

• Outage surge: 3x volume spikes handled with the same team

The customer

A utility delivering electricity and water services to households and businesses. Its 70 person support team handles a steady, heavy flow of billing and account questions on ordinary days, and a wall of panic on the days something goes down.

The challenge

Utility support has two speeds, and both were hurting.

The everyday speed is relentless and routine. Why is my bill higher this month. When is payment due. Can I set up a payment plan. How do I update my account. The same questions, hundreds of thousands of times a month, each one cheap to answer and impossible to escape.

The other speed is the outage. A substation fails on a hot afternoon and the queue triples in twenty minutes, thousands of customers all asking the same two things at once: is my area affected, and when will it be back. The team handled these with an all hands scramble, pulling agents off other work, and still made customers wait.

For the operations team, the problem was economics. Cost per conversation kept climbing, headcount could not scale with the spikes, and paying a full team to sit ready for outages that might come any day was money burning quietly in the background.

"On a normal day we were drowning in billing questions. On an outage day we were in a war room. Either way, my cost per conversation was going up and my ability to forecast it was going down. That is a bad combination for an operations leader." Chief Operating Officer

Why AutomatiCworX

The utility evaluated the market with one question in front: what does this actually cost at our volume, on a normal day and on the worst day.

That question decided it. Most tools priced per resolution, which meant an outage, the exact moment volume exploded, would also explode the bill. AutomatiCworX charged one flat monthly fee. The spike that used to mean overtime and scramble now cost nothing extra to handle. For a COO, that turned an unpredictable line into a fixed one.

It resolves the routine billing and account volume in the conversation, and it holds the line on control: any sensitive account action stops for human approval. It went live in nine days on top of the utility's existing systems, with no migration.

AutomatiCworX in action

A customer messages asking why their bill jumped this month. AutomatiCworX pulls the account, compares it to prior periods, explains the difference in plain terms, and offers a payment plan if they want one, all in the same thread.

The system carries the everyday core on its own: bill explanations, payment due dates, payment plan setup, balance and usage questions, account and address updates, outage status by area.

When an outage hits, the system does not buckle. It answers the flood of "is my area affected and when will it be back" instantly and consistently, from the live status, so thousands of customers get a straight answer at once instead of waiting in a queue. Anything that needs judgment, or a sensitive account change, escalates to the team with full context attached. The AI never acts alone on what matters.

The results

The utility changed both its cost base and its worst day.

• Cost per conversation fell by 58%.

• AutomaticWorX resolved 76% of conversations on its own.

• Outage spikes of up to 3x normal volume were handled with the same 70 agents, no war room.

• Average time to help dropped to under 5 minutes across both routine and surge periods.

What changed for the team

The routine billing flood used to eat the team's day, and outages used to wreck their week. Both are handled now. The agents spend their time on the accounts that genuinely need a person: disputes, hardship cases, the complicated situations where a human who can make a call actually matters.

"During an outage, my team used to stop everything and just absorb the wave. Now the system takes it, and my people handle the customers who really need us. Nobody dreads the next big spike anymore. That is a real change in how this team works." Head of Customer Support

What is next

The utility is extending AWX to proactive outage notifications and to Arabic language support across all channels, ahead of the summer demand peak.

See what AutomatiCworX can do for you.