Salesforce AI for Energy and Utilities
Performa IT
Performa IT is an accredited Salesforce consulting partner, helping businesses across Europe to excel in their industry.
In the increasingly competitive Energy and Utilities sector, companies face the dual challenge of reducing operational costs while enhancing customer engagement. Salesforce's AI-driven solutions, notably Einstein and Agentforce, offer transformative tools to address these challenges effectively. But what are the use cases?
Harnessing Salesforce Einstein for Enhanced Customer Engagement
Salesforce Einstein integrates advanced, generative AI capabilities directly into the Salesforce platform, enabling companies to:
Some examples of how this can apply to Energy and Utilities are:
1. Account and Customer Service Summaries and Next Best Action
Einstein provides service agents with instant, comprehensive insights into customer interactions, account histories, and service cases. This functionality service teams to quickly understand customer issues and offer personalised solutions. This can be taken one step further by combining Summaries with Next Best Action, so that service agents are provided with amendable solutions to customer queries without having to formulate responses from scratch. Einstein also has the power to take these responses and turn them into helpful knowledge articles to empower customers to self-serve.
Use Case: A utility company receives numerous customer inquiries daily. With Einstein, agents can access concise summaries of each customer's past interactions and account details, which the AI then uses to generate a response or ‘next best action’, allowing the service rep to resolve issues with accelerated speed and accuracy, improving customer satisfaction.
2. Bill and Energy Usage Insights
By centralising billing, rates, and consumption data, Einstein can generate AI-driven summaries and insights. This empowers service agents to provide accurate and timely support regarding billing inquiries and energy usage patterns.
Use Case: Customers often have questions about their consumption and bills. Einstein analyses usage data to identify trends or anomalies, enabling agents to explain charges clearly and suggest energy-saving measures, thereby enhancing transparency and trust.
3. Field Work Summary
Einstein assists field technicians by generating intelligent summaries of tasks, incorporating real-time customer data, work orders, and job images. This reduces administrative burdens and ensures accurate reporting.
Use Case: A field technician completes a maintenance job and uses Einstein to generate a detailed report, including steps taken and any issues encountered. This streamlined documentation process reduces paperwork and allows technicians to focus more on fieldwork. To save even more time, the field technician can use voice recording functionality to cut the data entry process down even further. These reports can even then be turned into knowledge articles for future training resources.
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4. Clean Energy Program Advisor
Einstein aids agents in guiding customers toward optimised energy usage by providing personalised recommendations on clean energy programs and services.
Use Case: An energy provider aims to promote its renewable energy programs as this is their value proposition. Einstein analyses customer profiles and usage patterns to identify those likely interested in clean energy solutions, enabling targeted outreach and increased program adoption.
Einstein features can provide great quick wins for businesses looking to leverage AI to save time, cut costs and improve their customer experience.
Implementing Agentforce to Streamline Operations
Agentforce, Salesforce's exciting new autonomous AI agent technology, automates more complex tasks across various functions. These agents have the power to act, making them available for a different, agentic, category of use cases than the generative Einstein tools. Here are three key ways we use Agentforce to give Energy and Utilities companies a leg-up in their industry:
Unsurprisingly, price is one of the most important factors to customers in this market, and often this is cited as the reason for transitioning to a new provider. We have taken the Einstein Billing Insights use case even further, using Agentforce AI to allow customers to compare their current bills, calling on additional resources like the EPC database to validate inputs from the customer, and using all of this information to dynamically outprice their competitors. By setting strict prompts and guardrails, you can ensure that you will achieve the right margins, balancing your business needs with customer incentives.
With the right knowledge articles and prompts, Agentforce can get to know your customer on a scale that would require a massive investment to replicate in hiring a physical sales team. Customer activities, purchase history, previous engagement and behaviours all make up a picture of their preferences and intent. Armed with this information, these AI agents can advise your customers on which products or services would suit them best, upselling certain upgrades based on both their profile and the nuances of each Agentforce interaction 24/7.
For our clients in this sector, scheduling and coordinating field service is a substantial admin burden that they aim to reduce. Salesforce has certainly alleviated much of the manual data entry with its various automation capabilities and products such as Field Service Lightning, but businesses can now enlist Agentforce to do ALL of the heavy lifting. AI Agents can schedule, amend and cancel appointments using logic from the Atlas reasoning engine to correctly decipher and interpret customer requests, all while acknowledging external elements such as engineer availability and experience, operating hours and resource fluctuations.
Not only can these use cases reduce costs by automating routine tasks, decreasing reliance on third-party resources and limiting the need to expand your existing team, but they can become a driving force for customer acquisition. Personalised and timely interactions (and actions) foster stronger customer relationships, helping to retain existing customers and win new ones. As the Energy and Utilities vertical continues to navigate complex dynamics in the macro and micro environment, leveraging Salesforce's AI solutions like Einstein and Agentforce offers a strategic advantage in a saturated market.
Book a call with us today to learn how we can help you enrich your customer experience, cut costs and streamline your operations with Salesforce AI.