Industries — Utilities

Ready for the storm before it hits

When an outage sends call volume from a quiet Tuesday to ten times normal in minutes, your contact center becomes the utility. We engineer Webex-powered outage call automation, bill pay IVR, and member self-service that hold service levels through the worst night of the year.

01 — Industry Challenges

When the lights go out, the phones light up.

Utility contact centers live between two extremes: months of routine billing traffic, then a storm night that multiplies volume tenfold. Both problems share a root cause — too much of the workload still needs a human.

Outage call surges

A single storm cell can drive 10x call volume in minutes. Queues sized for an average afternoon collapse at the exact moment customers need answers most.

24/7 service expectations

Power doesn’t keep business hours, and neither do your customers. Live-agent-only models leave nights and weekends exposed — or staffed at unsustainable cost.

Routine billing volume

Bill pay, balance checks, and payment arrangements dominate daily traffic — repeatable contacts that don’t need a human yet bury your agents anyway.

Aging systems, rate-payer pressure

Legacy IVRs and premise hardware cost more every year, while commissions, boards, and rate payers expect the same service for less.

03 — Relevant Workflows

Proven blueprints from the AI Workflow Library

Four of our 17 production workflows do the heaviest lifting for utilities — each documented, tested, and running for real customers today.

WF / 01

AI IVR / Voice Bot

Outage reporting and restoration status by voice — callers report, verify, and get an estimate without ever touching a queue.

WF / 02

Callback / Virtual Hold

The surge absorber. Callers keep their place in line and hang up — the system calls them back as agents free up, so nobody waits on hold at 2 a.m.

WF / 03

Outbound Dialing

Proactive restoration notifications to affected circuits — customers hear from you before they call, and volume falls before it forms.

WF / 04

Agentless Routing

Emergency messaging that answers, informs, and routes at any volume — critical updates delivered with zero agents in the path.

04 — Compliance Requirements

Built for regulated, critical infrastructure

Consent, commission reporting, and continuity aren’t afterthoughts — they’re designed in from the first Lucidchart workflow diagram.

  • TCPA consent management — proactive outage and restoration notifications go only to opted-in numbers, with consent records kept and opt-outs honored automatically
  • PUC & co-op service standards reporting — answer-time, abandonment, and service-level reporting formatted for commission filings and board review
  • Critical-infrastructure security posture — SSO, role-based access, and hardened cloud architecture aligned with the expectations placed on essential services
  • Storm-event continuity plans — documented surge playbooks, agentless emergency messaging, and work-from-home agent failover rehearsed before the season starts
TCPA NERC-aware 24/7
In Queue214
Callbacks Queued1,120
Self-Serve71%
SL / 30s82%

Storm-mode dashboard mock: surge hits, self-service and callback absorb the spike, service level holds.

05 — Case Study

A national utility took the routine off its queues

24/7

self-service for resets, bill pay & scheduling

National Utilities Company

We deployed self-service automation across the highest-volume routine contacts — service resets, bill payment, and appointment scheduling — completed end to end without an agent. The calls that still reach a human arrive with context, measurably reducing talk time and queue times.

UtilitiesAI Self-ServiceBill Pay IVR
Co-op

Webex Contact Center migration for an electric cooperative

MidSouth EC

An electric co-op migration to Webex Contact Center that delivered enhanced functionality and a modernized member journey — member services engineered around how a cooperative actually serves its community, not around the limits of the old platform.

Electric Co-opWebex MigrationMember Services
Before the next storm season

Make the next outage a non-event for your contact center

Start with a no-obligation assessment. We’ll map your outage, billing, and member-service workflows, find the fastest wins, and show you the crawl-walk-run path to get there.