PSEG Improves Contact Center Performance with Omilia

Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) is a publicly traded diversified energy company operating in New Jersey and New York’s Long Island. In New Jersey it provides natural gas to 1.8 million customers and electricity to 2.2 million customers. Its Long Island business serves 1.1 million customers

With such a large customer base, it’s unsurprising that the utility receives more than 7 million inbound calls annually, employing more than 750 active agents to handle customer interactions.

But PSEG’s on-premises call center system was operating a handful of dissimilar systems from different vendors. Due to the age of those technologies, there was no simple path to integration, according to Rajesh Sahu, PSEG senior IT manager. “With our legacy system, we couldn’t capture the full customer journey. We had no end-to-end visibility of the customer.”

Additionally, customer calls were being mis-routed, and the call center couldn’t handle the high call volume that is typical during severe weather or similar events. The legacy system also relied on a rigid, keyword-dependent structure that couldn’t respond to customers’ changing requests, resulting in low self-service adoption and too many calls going to human agents.

To turn that around, PSEG sought an AI-driven solution that could provide humanlike conversations via the digital channel, support natural language conversations in English and Spanish, move appropriate calls to the digital channel, and offer predictive analytics to help determine why people were calling. The platform also had to provide 24/7 support.

With those criteria in hand, PSEG eventually selected Omilia’s conversational AI solution, which includes the following features:

• advanced speech recognition, enabling customers to use conversational language;
• real-time interaction analytics to improve visibility into customer behavior;
• efficient call routing;
• fraud detection to identify and block spam calls; and
• full uptime during severe weather conditions.

Before implementing the solution, PSEG tested it to ensure that it could scale to handle the expected calls if it suffered a 75 percent outage. “We conducted robust performance testing. We call it Blue Sky vs. the Storm. Blue Sky is on any given day, when less than 10 percent of customers will call. During a storm, that can go way up to 60 percent or 70 percent,” Sahu says. “We made sure that the solution that we were implementing could handle that load. Once that performance test was passed, we rolled it to our call center, to all of our agents.”

The rollout occurred over four days, starting with smaller departments before moving to larger ones.

“It was very smooth,” Sahu says of the rollout. “We were able to see the value of the solution right away.

In addition to the basic features, Omilia also helped PSEG implement 11 self-service options for account inquiries, different bill payment options, repair appointment scheduling, and more to boost efficiency and customer satisfaction

The benefits derived from the new system have been impressive, according to Sahu. “We have been able to increase our interactive voice response containment rate by 4 percent. We handle approximately 72.5 million calls a year, so that 4 percent number really matters.”

Additionally, PSEG has improved speed-to-answer by 31 percent, and the call abandonment percentage has dropped by 18 percent.

Another critical benefit is that the systems uptime has been 99.99 percent, Sahu says. “That’s a great way to run our business.”

In the next year, Sahu hopes to further increase PSEG’s IVR containment and increase its virtual agent capabilities. “We also want to establish a unified knowledge ecosystem to improve agent effectiveness and enable better self-service,” Sahu says.

And PSEG has long-term goals for further contact center improvements, Sahu adds. “We have a five-year look-ahead road map, and Omilia is definitely part of that road map,” he says.

The Payoff

Since implementing Omilia’s conversational AI solution, PSEG has seen the following results:

• increased IVR containment by 4 percent;
• decreased call abandonment rate by 18 percent; and
• increased speed to answer by 31 percent.