Flagship reference deployment
Currently live
City of Kingsport, TennesseeHow Kingsport answered 20,379 calls with zero hold time
The phones were flooded. Zero hold time.
How Grace handled a month of heavy call volume on the City of Kingsport's utility line, including a water outage, with zero hold time and a customer service team that never fell behind.
- Period
- Measured over the first month in production
- Scale
- ~47,000 utility accounts
- System
- Deployed with Hansen Technologies CIS
- 20,379
Calls handled
Including 2,611 outbound
- 60.3%
Resolved end to end
~80% excluding caller-requested transfers
- 1:53
Average call duration
Most finished inside three minutes
- 0:00
Average time on hold
Answered on the first ring, day or night
- 67%
Callers auto-verified
Authenticated from the number they called on
Measured over the first month in production · ~47,000 utility accounts · Deployed with Hansen Technologies CIS. Grace has been answering the line ever since.
“This is a gamechanger for both the City of Kingsport and its citizens.”
Context
The phones are full, and the team is stretched thin.
A municipal utility's phone line is the front door for tens of thousands of accounts. Billing questions, payments, autopay, outages: it all comes through the phone, and in a busy month the calls do not let up.
Over the month measured here, the line took more than 20,000 calls, and a water outage drove a wave of them on one of the days.
The legacy phone system was a touch-tone menu. It could route a call, but not answer a billing question or take a payment. Without something that could hold a real conversation, that volume lands straight in the hold queue.
The question is not whether to automate the phone line. It is whether the automation can carry real volume on a busy day, not just the quiet ones.
This is not unique to Kingsport. Across the sector, call volume is rising while experienced staff retire faster than utilities can replace them.
Deployment
Grace answers first, and hands off when it counts.
Dial AI deployed Grace on the City's main utility line, integrated with Hansen CIS and replacing the legacy IVR. Grace is the first point of contact: she verifies the caller, pulls their account from Hansen in real time, and handles the request end to end. When a call needs a person, she hands it to a CSR with the full story already written up.
Conversational voice and SMS layer. System of record in Hansen CIS, payments via Paymentus, live-agent pickup through Cisco Webex Contact Center.
What Grace handles
- Bill inquiries
- Payments
- Auto Pay enrollment
- Payment arrangements
- Identity verification
- Contact info updates
- Paperless / bill delivery
- Payment history
- Outage reporting
- Live-agent handoff
Why it carried the volume.
Instant, bilingual, 24/7
Answers on the first ring, day or night, in fluent English or Spanish. No phone tree and no hold music, ever.
Real-time CIS integration
Pulls live account, balance and billing history from Hansen during the call. Grace works from the customer's real record, not a static script.
Caller ID verification
Authenticates most callers automatically from the number they are calling on. In month one, 67% were verified with no manual steps.
Mid-call SMS
Texts payment links, forms and resources while the caller is still on the line, so they leave the call with what they need in hand.
Context-preserving handoff
On transfer, the CSR receives a written summary and full transcript, posted to the customer's account. The caller never repeats their account number or reason for calling.
Tuned live, no downtime
Outage reporting was added during the water outage and refinements shipped through the week, all pushed to production without taking Grace off the line for a moment.
Answers many at once
Grace can handle more than 30 calls at the same time, so a spike in volume never turns into a queue.
Empathetic by design
Grace reads caller sentiment as the conversation unfolds and adjusts its tone, so responses feel aware and human, not scripted.
Results · month one
Where every inbound call ended up.
83% of the 17,705 inbound calls were either resolved by Grace or routed to a person exactly because the caller asked for one.
62% of all escalations were operator-requested, not cases Grace could not handle. Counting only calls where the caller did not ask for an operator, Grace resolved 79.5% end to end.
Billing and payments together were about 58% of all calls. Nearly a third of all customer payments in the month were completed through Grace.
The customer journey
A faster, simpler call for every resident.
For the person calling about a bill, the change was immediate. No queue to sit through, no portal to learn, no callback to wait on. Here is the same call, before and after Grace.
Before
With Grace
Hold music, a callback, or a wait until morning.
Answered on the first ring, day or night, in English or Spanish.
Wait for a rep to look up and read the balance.
Balance read back in seconds, payment link texted to the caller.
Get transferred to pay, or call back to do it later.
Pay by phone in the same call, most finished in under two minutes.
Answer a string of security questions first.
Verified automatically from the caller's number two times out of three.
Repeat the account number and story to each person.
If a specialist is needed, they already know who is calling and why.
The average call ran 1:53, roughly half the time a live agent needs, and most finished in under three minutes. The result is a shorter call, fewer call-backs, and a line that never makes anyone wait. When the water outage hit, Grace took outage reports as the calls came in, so residents got answers in the moment instead of a busy signal.
The takeaway
Proof on a busy month.
Kingsport did not test Grace on a quiet week. The phones were full, a water outage drove a wave of calls, and Grace carried it: more than 20,000 calls answered on the first ring, the routine volume handled end to end, and a team free to spend the month with the callers who needed them. For any utility weighing automation against a stretched call center and a retiring workforce, that is the test that matters.
A reference conversation with the City of Kingsport team can be arranged on request.
Keep reading
Read the full Kingsport case study
Two details and the rest opens right here.
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