How enercity powered up its support with a 40% automation rate

enercity is a German energy company based in Hannover that focuses on providing sustainable energy solutions from renewable sources to its customers. The support department of over 200 agents spread over five teams offers support across email, telephone, and chat. Agents provide help to enercity’s almost one million residential and commercial customers throughout Germany. The company wanted an efficient way to tackle requests, while giving agents more time to focus on complex queries, so they turned to Zendesk AI agents.

How Enercity supercharges its support

As a forward-thinking energy company focused on creating a sustainable future, enercity was keen to incorporate the latest tech into its support stack. But after trying other bots built for enterprise businesses, the team was not impressed with what they found. That was until they turned to the Zendesk AI agent for its ability to accommodate sophisticated use cases and capacity to make changes to conversation flows quickly and easily.

And thanks to a collaborative onboarding experience with the Zendesk Customer Success Manager, Frances, the team felt empowered to automate intents right from the start. As enercity’s Process Manager in Customer Management, Anna-Maria Kannenberg, says, “I can do everything by myself, from defining intents to working on processes. We can look at the tickets and solve problems if they arise.” This is especially important when you consider that enercity servess several hundred thousand customers—which amounts to a lot of questions.

Since launch, enercity has already surpassed its target KPIs. For an AI resolution rate, the team was aiming for 40 percent and have reached 54 percent. For the automation rate, the goal was 30 percent and 40 percent has been achieved. Compared to other enterprise bots on the market that have only a 4 to 5 percent intent recognition rate, the Zendesk AI agent’s is 79 percent. enercity currently has four employees that focus on managing the AI agent, which has become an integral part of the support team, acting as the first touchpoint for the most common queries.

AI use case spotlight #1: Automating the most-common requests

One of enercity’s highest volume tickets involves customers entering their meter readings, which ensures they receive the correct energy bills and that the company accurately reports its energy usage. With the help of API integrations that act as a liaison between the customer-facing interaction and the company’s backend systems, the team has successfully been able to reach a 59.6 percent automation rate on this intent. As a result, customers converse with the AI agent to update their meter readings via the customer portal, giving them a flexible touchpoint they can access 24/7.

AI use case spotlight #2: Automation for enterprise support

In an enterprise organization with a large number of customers, the efficiency of support operations is key. enercity’s AI agent has become an essential part of its support stack, as they are able to easily automate a wide breadth of the most common intents, from payments to complaint management. The team has already automated 60 such intents, with the AI agent resolving more than half of all queries so that agents can dedicate their energy to more complex issues.

A seamless solution that delights customers and agents alike

As an enterprise organization with a large support department, it was essential that enercity’s AI agent could seamlessly integrate with the existing support stack. Plus, the company had tried other bot providers in the past, but they were frustrated with the clunky bureaucracy involved in making tweaks to the conversation flows. Enter: Zendesk AI agents. Implementation was easy and with Zendesk’s dialogue builder, enercity’s support team is able to quickly and easily customize dialogues in a user-friendly interface.

In addition to making the support team’s lives easier, enercity’s AI agent is able to provide round-the-clock customer service. By automating common intents such as billing and account management, customers can instantly resolve queries in the customer portal 24/7, whenever it suits them. What’s more, thanks to API integrations and a high intent recognition rate, enercity has already automated more than 60 intents—including the use cases essential to their industry, such as reporting meter readings.

Next on enercity’s automation journey

enercity plans to continue adding API integrations to the AI agent, in order to enrich the capabilities of the company’s automated support. The team is also very interested in using the Data Export API feature, which allows for the export of bot conversation data, to better track what’s going on.

The AI agent team also looks forward to adding new languages to accommodate their English, Russian, and Turkish customers—and to drawing on the power of generative AI to automate more FAQ-style requests.