Outage calls.
Everyone on the street rings within the same twenty minutes. Volume is flat and then it is vertical.
“My power is out. Is it just me?”
Why it is harder than it looks
The call is simple and the arrival pattern is not. Staffing for the peak means paying for idle capacity on every ordinary day, so the peak is precisely when hold times are worst, which is precisely when the customer is least patient.
What happens today
A recorded message that may or may not have been updated, or a queue. Both tell the customer the utility already knows, which is often untrue and always unsatisfying.
What the agent does instead
The agent checks the outage management system against the caller's address, tells them whether it is a known event and what the restoration estimate is, and logs a new report if it is not. Hundreds of these run concurrently, so the hundredth caller waits as long as the first.
Systems it reads
- Outage management system
- Customer information system
- Service address data
What it can execute
- Match the caller to a service address
- Check for a known outage
- Give the restoration estimate
- Log a new outage report
- Record a hazard for dispatch
Where it stops
A downed line, a gas smell, or anything that sounds like a safety risk goes straight to a person. Speed matters more than containment on those, and the agent should hand over rather than finish.
In production
Kingsport's published month covered a water outage, during which the line stayed answered on the first ring with no measurable hold time.1
Common questions
Can AI handle utility outage calls?
Yes, and outage calls are where concurrency matters most. The agent matches the caller to a service address, checks the outage management system for a known event, gives the restoration estimate, and logs a report if the outage is not yet known. Hundreds run at once, so a storm does not create a queue.
What happens if the caller reports something dangerous?
A downed line, a gas smell or anything that sounds like a safety risk is handed to a person immediately rather than handled. On those calls speed matters more than resolving without a human.
What does an AI agent say when there is no restoration estimate yet?
That there is no estimate yet. The agent gives back whatever the outage management system knows, and when no restoration time exists, that is the honest answer rather than a guess. The usual alternative is a recorded message that may or may not have been updated.
Does an AI agent need to be connected to the outage management system?
To tell a caller whether their outage is a known event and when it should be restored, yes, because that information lives in the outage management system. At the City of Kingsport, outage reporting was added during a water outage and pushed to production without taking the agent off the line, and integration with outage management has continued since.
Can an AI agent handle calls during a water main break?
Yes. A main break produces the same arrival pattern as a storm: everyone on the street rings within the same twenty minutes. The City of Kingsport's first month in production included a water outage, during which the line was answered on the first ring with no measurable hold time and the agent took outage reports as the calls came in.
How does an AI agent find the address for an outage report?
It matches the caller to a service address before checking for a known outage. Where the address is taken in conversation, the agent collects the street, city and ZIP or postal code, and on a voice call confirms the street name by asking the caller to spell it or by reading a numbered street back.
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