Contact centre automation.
The whole line rather than one workflow: what changes when the first thing every caller reaches can actually finish the job.
Every call above, arriving at once, in no particular order.
Why it is harder than it looks
A contact centre's cost is set by its simultaneous peak, not its monthly total, and its worst days are the ones where a storm or a bill run puts every category in the queue together. Automating one workflow moves a slice of that. Automating the front of the line changes the shape.
What happens today
A touch-tone tree that asks the customer to self-route by department when they can only describe a symptom, followed by a queue that is longest exactly when demand is highest.
What the agent does instead
The agent answers everything on the first ring, handles what is in scope end to end, and hands the rest over with the context attached. Staff stop taking the repetitive calls and keep the ones that need judgement.
Systems it reads
- Telephony
- Customer information system
- Billing
- Payments
- Outage management
- Case management
What it can execute
- Answer every call immediately, including out of hours
- Authenticate
- Resolve in-scope requests end to end
- Transfer with full context
- Record every interaction
Where it stops
Scope is a deliberate choice, not a limit discovered later. Anything outside it reaches a person untouched rather than receiving a partial answer.
In production
At the City of Kingsport: 20,379 calls in the first month, 60.3% resolved end to end, an average call of 1:53, no measurable time on hold, and 67% of callers authenticated from the number they called on.1
Common questions
What does AI contact centre automation do for a utility?
It puts an agent at the front of the line that answers immediately, identifies the caller, and completes the common requests against the system of record, handing everything else to staff with the context attached. The gain is concentrated at the peak, because the agent runs hundreds of conversations at once and a queue never forms.
Does automating the contact centre mean replacing staff?
In the deployments we can evidence it has meant staff stopping the repetitive calls and keeping the ones that need judgement. The agent is explicitly scoped, and the requests outside that scope are the ones a person is better at.
Can a caller still ask to speak to a person?
Yes, and many do. At the City of Kingsport, 62% of escalations in the first month were callers asking for an operator rather than calls the agent could not handle. Counting only calls where the caller did not ask for one, the agent resolved 79.5% end to end.
What should a utility measure after automating its contact centre?
Time on hold, the share of calls resolved end to end, and how many callers come back within a week. Containment is the number everyone asks for, and alone it flatters; repeat calls are what catch a system closing calls it did not actually finish.
Are AI agent conversations recorded and reviewed?
Yes. Every interaction is recorded, and a review agent assesses each conversation after the fact, flagging a bad answer, a missed escalation or a caller getting frustrated. Flagged conversations go to a person, and the corrections feed back into the configuration.
Does the same AI agent handle phone, web chat, text and email?
Yes. Dial AI runs one agent across voice, web chat, SMS and email, with the same integrations, guardrails and escalation rules on each. A customer who calls on Tuesday and emails on Thursday is the same person with the same problem, and should not have to explain it twice.
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