RPA for Energy and Utilities Automation

In the face of heightened customer expectations, new competitors and stringent regulations, IA and RPA can help enhance customer experience. It brings online access, digital channels, proactive personalized service and self-service options to organizations, helping them move away from outdated practices.

Contact center and call handling

IA and digital workers streamline customer calls by gathering real-time information, addressing inquiries like billing updates. With natural language processing (NLP), they understand and respond to common queries, update records and initiate follow-ups effortlessly.

Outbound customer service

Digital workers provide consistent and proactive customer contact, from payment reminders to personalized offers and rate change notifications. Digital workers can ensure your customers stay updated on the latest information for improved customer service.

Customer account and complaints management

Streamline account activation and deactivation activities and update customer records across multiple systems. Automate outreach to ensure customers are kept informed of progress regularly and maintain compliance standards.

Omni channel virtual agent

Extend the reach of customer conversations for speedier outcomes, reduced costs and award-winning moments. Quickly understand what your customers want and allocate resources effectively to be able to deliver on them.

Digital asset management makes it possible to capture and analyze the data necessary to plan, build and operate assets on a near real-time basis. This can be achieved by automating much of the inspection and assessment of critical infrastructure to optimize economic return on assets.

Predictive asset management and maintenance

Maximize operational efficiencies and predict failure faster by building end-to-end AI/ML predictive maintenance models into business-as-usual systems — resulting in higher equipment uptime and lower operational cost.

Maintenance and forecast planning 

Automate regular scheduling of maintenance and safety checks, as well as any rescheduling requirements based on reports from the field.

Asset record updates

Enable engineers to update records in the field and automatically sync with multiple back-office systems to ensure accuracy and consistency, and to maintain SLAs.

Proactive purchase orders

Check inventory levels against actual stock and automatically generate purchase orders to suppliers, speeding up the process and preventing delays.

Digital workers excel at data retrieval, ensuring precise billing without the risk of manual errors. Their capabilities also extend to providing customers with a user-friendly experience by offering a variety of payment options. Additionally, through IA, you can automate payment reminders and follow-ups for late payments, enhancing overall efficiency in billing processes.

Meter readings collation

Automate the collection of meter readings from multiple sources such as smart meters, customers, third-party meter readers and estimates.

Billing exception management

IA ensures accurate billing by investigating meter reading discrepancies from multiple sources. It prevents erroneous bills and enhances customer experience by automatically checking reliable meter-reading sources and correcting the billing system.

Exceptional consumption checks

Intelligent automation can check accounts that show excessive or negative consumption and correct the errors or request further information.

Mobile payment reconciliation

Integrate legacy billing systems with third-party mobile payment applications to enable customers to pay with ease. Digital workers take data from mobile payments and update the core billing system, reconciling payments without manual human intervention.

Minimizing overdue debt can help energy and utility providers remain robust during challenging times. Streamlining collections processes is essential in reducing costs, reducing bad debt and ultimately improving customer experience.

Collection visit updates

Collection agents submit updates on the stage and status of visits, whether debt collection has been successful or not. Digital workers take this information and update all appropriate systems, saving manual effort and eliminating rekeying errors.

Case file preparation

Intelligent automation is used to pull together customer information, such as searching credit record websites, prior to collection action proceeding. Automated validation saves manual effort upfront and reduces wasted agent time from unnecessary visits.

Reacting to and complying with regulatory changes can be difficult. A digital workforce can improve response times to meet existing regulatory SLAs, help you respond to new regulations faster and help you understand the impact of the changes on operational costs.

Regulation execution

Automate new regulatory processes from the start. Reduce the cost of training your human workforce and go straight to digital workers. Reduce the risk of human error and increase the speed of execution.

Auditing

Ensure a complete audit trail and stay compliant by automating internal reviews to proactively identify potential compliance issues.

Performance reporting

Digital workers can collect data and build reports to demonstrate regulatory performance and SLAs.

Impact measurement

Automate the measurement of pre- and post-regulation impact on operational costs.

Maintaining and managing complex supplier relationships is critical to an effective supply chain and efficient production. Intelligent automation enables utility providers to oversee their supplier portfolio to optimize performance, be more cost effective and ensure regulatory requirements are met.

Supplier onboarding

Digital workers pull together the data and documentation needed to set up approved and vetted suppliers accurately and efficiently.

Performance management

Digital workers pull together the appropriate data to measure supplier performance against contractual service level agreements (SLAs), ensuring any issues can be highlighted early and actioned as necessary.

Contract management

Create and update accurate and timely supplier contracts, and proactively alert suppliers when contract agreements are due for renewal to ensure enough time is available for renegotiation.

Risk mitigation

Digital workers can continuously monitor all supplier activities, ensuring adherence to compliance standards and identifying potential risks. They can keep track of regulatory requirements and supplier compliance, so utility providers can proactively look after compliance across their supplier network.

Several countries have committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 and environmental, social and governance (ESG) regulations are evolving. Changes in the generation and consumption of energy and utilities require innovation, and IA is helping drive better solutions.

Environmental impact assessment

Digital workers can analyze data related to supplier practices and processes, assessing their environmental impact. This includes evaluating energy consumption, waste management and carbon emissions to ensure alignment with sustainability goals.

Supply chain transparency

Employing digital workers enhances transparency across the supply chain by tracking and verifying sustainable sourcing practices. This ensures that suppliers adhere to ethical and eco-friendly standards, contributing to overall sustainability initiatives.