OOWV: Automated meter readings in the shortest possible time

Private households, companies and local authorities – they all rely on the Oldenburgisch-Ostfriesischer Wasserverband, or OOWV for short, for their drinking water supply and wastewater disposal. The OOWV is one of the 10 leading water management companies in Germany and supplies over one million people sustainably.

Optimization by
deepassist
~ 15.000
AUTOMATICALLY RECORDED METER READINGS
Customer
OOWV
Industry
Utilities
Company Size
500 - 1000

The Challenge

Due to new regulatory requirements, OOWV customers had to submit their meter readings from within 10 days 31 December 2022 for billing purposes. For the 30 or so employees in customer service, this meant manually recording tens of thousands of meter readings – a huge challenge! Such peak times are of course not only an enormous additional burden for the employees, but unfortunately also result in long waiting times for customers. And this will continue to be the case every year.

Smiling woman using laptop while talking to customer on phone. Consulting corporate client in conversation with customer using computer on desk. Service desk consultant talking in a call center and working on laptop.

Advantages of the deepassist AI

Industry specific

The deepassist AI already has the relevant knowledge of the energy sector and thus reduced the training effort many times over.

Strategic

The use of deepassist as a C-NLU (Causal Natural Language Understanding) solution can be utilised by all specialist departments within the OOWV.

The Solution

The greatest immediate added value was expected from the introduction of an intelligent voicebot. Instead of a static voice menu in which the caller selects their request from a predefined list by pressing a button (“Press 1 for…, 2 for…, 3 for…”), the AI specially developed for utility companies, deepassist utility, now enables the bot to understand speech naturally. Callers are asked an open question about their request, such as “What can we do for you?”. The answer, formulated in colloquial language, is interpreted by deepassist, which leads to a relevant dialogue, e.g. to report the meter reading. In the course of the dialogue, various data, such as the water meter number, consumption point number or contract account number, must also be correctly recognised and processed. deepassist utility is the driving intelligence of the voicebot, which is necessary to efficiently help as many customers as possible with routine issues. The time saved for the customer is considerable, and the messages can be conveniently sent 24/7 at any time thanks to full automation. This also leads to a noticeable reduction in the workload for customer service staff.

The technological partnership between deepassist and babelforce impressed with its agile solution approach: with babelforce, there is no need to replace the telephone system, as incoming calls can be redirected to the software-based call centre platform. On the other hand, deepassist provides a pre-trained, industry-specific semantic AI that understands the caller’s colloquial language and initiates appropriate solution steps. babelforce and deepassist are both no-code platforms, which means that they can be implemented without programming. This means that call centre automation can also be implemented quickly and cost-effectively in medium-sized companies. The use of deepassist utility has increased the effectiveness of the voicebot by 40%.

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A win-win-win situation

Despite a shortage of resources, we were able to implement our requirements quickly thanks to deepassist’s pre-trained AI, significantly reduce the workload on our employees and offer our customers improved availability. Strategically, we have created a basis for further AI-supported use cases in customer service with deepassist.

The Results

Within just a few weeks, the intelligent voicebot went live and was able to process thousands of meter reading messages automatically, noticeably reducing the workload for customer service. Thanks to deepassist’s strategic technological approach, the semantic AI can be quickly rolled out to other communication channels such as emails.

Automate Your Customer Service

During a short demo appointment, we will show you how we automate routine enquiries via telephone, email and chat.

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Ein Foto vom Sales Manager, Florian Silberbauer.

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Florian Silberbauer
Sales Manager