Utilities Call on Oracle AI to Transform Customer Service

New AI capabilities in the Oracle Utilities Customer Platform help call centers better manage volume and quickly deliver smart, personalized assistance

PHOENIX, May 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovate UtilityCX -- Today, Oracle announced new AI-powered call summarization and tagging capabilities in the Oracle Utilities Customer Platform, bringing intelligent automation to utility call centers. By helping reduce manual work, these innovations are expected to empower agents to focus on delivering fast issue resolution, personalized service, and real human connection at scale. Oracle is working to help utilities streamline call center operations, lower operating costs, and elevate the customer experience for millions of people around the world. The new AI capabilities are planned to be available at no additional cost to utilities using Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service.

Gas South is leading the way in exploring with Oracle how to deploy AI capabilities best. "At Gas South, we are always looking for new ways to leverage data and automation to deliver better service, improve efficiency, and support our employees," said Greg Dunavant, vice president of customer operations at Gas South. "We are excited to integrate new AI capabilities, with a focus on enhancing the customer experience, empowering our agents, and driving continuous improvement across our organization." Gas South serves nearly half a million customers across 14 states.

Modernizing customer-agent experiences
The AI capabilities in Oracle's customer platform help utilities address today's most pressing call center challenges, including long wait times, inconsistent customer experiences, and tedious, inaccurate data capture. Soon, utilities will be empowered to benefit from built-in listening tools that aid in customer interactions to allow agents to focus on the conversation versus worrying about documentation. This will enable agents to provide faster, more proactive service by better anticipating customer needs before they arise and foreseeing potential issues or opportunities. By lowering total average handle time, the new features also are expected to help support utilities' average speed of answer (ASA) to help meet address requirements.

Many utilities struggle with data limitations that make it hard to understand what is driving call volume and inquiry types. Typically, this is determined by the customers' selections made in the interactive voice response (IVR) or based on the agents' post-call categorization. The new AI capabilities are being developed to add call tags for each call to note billing issues, service interruptions, and other inquiries unique to each call. Utilities will have the ability to choose their own set of categories, make changes any time, and track data such as seasonal or temporary changes in call volume to understand the impact and underlying cause.

The new AI capabilities in the Oracle Customer Platform are also planned to support:

• Industry jargon recognition: The AI recognizes commonly used industry and corporate jargon, as well as utility-specific business language, to help generate more accurate, contextually relevant call summaries.
  
  
• Personally Identifiable Information (PII) protection: The AI assists in automatically removing PII from call summaries to help protect customer privacy and address compliance with utility policies. Agents can still modify summaries as appropriate.
  
  
• Obscenity and noise filtering: The AI automatically filters out background noise and irrelevant language so that call summaries reflect clear, professional conversations between agents and customers.

"Utility call centers are under constant pressure to handle heavy call volume and provide the fast, accurate service and experiences customers expect, but they have lacked the real-time tools required to be successful," said James Steadman, global head of customer product strategy, Oracle Utilities. "These new AI features are planned to empower agents with essential capabilities and deep insights to understand and proactively address customer issues faster than ever. AI can be a game changer for customer operations. If we can help save 20-30% of spending on customer operations annually (estimated at $124 billion per year industry-wide), that could result in up to $37 billion in savings across the industry." 

In addition to natively embedding AI in SaaS offerings, on-premises customers can also benefit by accessing these innovations via a rich set of APIs. Next, Oracle plans to equip agents with AI-generated customer snapshots before calls start, helping speed resolution and improve the customer connection. In addition, Oracle plans to add full call transcripts to automatically generate comprehensive summaries for agents, to reduce manual processes and help improve call note accuracy. This can enable call center leaders to analyze trends and review call information for agent training and quality assurance. Oracle is building on these new AI capabilities with even more Customer Platform innovations designed to help streamline utility work, reduce utility operating costs, and elevate utility customer service. 

To see these AI capabilities in action, visit Oracle at Innovate UtilityCX at Booth #1205 or learn more by visiting Oracle.com/utilities or LinkedIn.

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SOURCE Oracle