South East Water is on the cusp of going live with two Salesforce AI services that it hopes will allow customer service agents to resolve calls faster, improving customer experience and satisfaction.
South East Water’s Peter Hiransi.
The utility, which is state-owned and serves an area including Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and the Mornington Peninsula, started laying the groundwork for AI adoption in March.
Group manager of customer strategy and design Peter Hiransi told a Salesforce Agentforce World Tour event in Melbourne that “within the Victorian water utilities space, we’ll be the first … to implement AI.”
The utility will use two Salesforce Einstein services, case classification and summarisation, to help agents who handle inbound customer calls. Go-live is set for December 2.
“We don’t want people to wait on the phone in the contact centre,” Hiransi said, adding that SE Water is hoping to deliver “improved customer experience and satisfaction” through reduced call handling time.
Hiransi said the utility had taken “a very cautious approach” to prepare for its first AI use cases, with the technology team leading a collaborative effort to draw up an AI governance framework.
Support policies and an operational control plan – defining roles and responsibilities – rounded out the planning work.
The intent, Hiransi said, was “to make sure that [with] whatever we put in place, we are safeguarding customer data … to have a level of confidence that we’re not going to put customer data information in jeopardy because we’ve gone through the risk and privacy assessments and so on.”
The approach ultimately led to executive and board sign-off on the first two AI use cases, which will be treated as test cases for AI generally.
‘Single view of customer’
In parallel, the utility has kicked off what is expected to be a “multi-year project” to build a data lake that will support a bid to get to a “single view of customer” across the utility’s operations.
This will require consolidation of multiple records of one customer that may exist in different systems or parts of the utility.
“We’re still going through that journey,” Hiransi said.
“It’s certainly not an easy journey, but the vision we see moving forward is that if a customer calls us, we can see who it is, what their latest interaction is, and what other data exists within digital platforms.”
Supporting this effort is a focus on data ownership and data stewardship across the organisation, with Hiransi noting that he is the data owner for customer data, supported by “a big team under my area to act as data stewards”.