BESCOM plans to use AI to handle customer complaints

BENGALURU: The Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM) will call tenders for the implementation of artificial intelligence through interactive chat and voice bots in a month.BESCOM has already initiated talks to integrate Google Home, Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri with their helpline, WhatsApp, website and BESCOM Mithra app. “It will handle complaints, billing and power outage issues. The voice bot will be able to understand and respond in English, Hindi as well as various dialects of Kannada. The language and way of expressing differs with Kannada speakers in Bengaluru, Chitradurga, Kolar and Dharwad for instance,” said Anil D'Souza, head of Technology Innovation Centre, BESCOM.   

“It will also have a feature called sentiment analysis that will gauge the level of frustration of the consumer in case of a complaint. They should not have to repeat their location, time of power outage etc multiple times. If the bot senses high levels of anger or frustration, it will transfer the complainant to a human BESCOM staffer,” he added.

In the second phase of the project, BESCOM will add customer engagement features.“Registered consumers will get details on their power usage. A person can compare their electricity usage with those using similar amounts of power. They will be bunched into a bracket based on their usage over a three month period. This will help them gauge if they have exceeded their average consumption,” he said.
The power utility has also discussed with Facebook's WhatsApp to integrate the chat bot option.

It will take six to eight weeks for the project to be implemented once the bidder is finalised. When an expression of interest was called in January this year, 14 vendors had responded.“The chat and voice bots will facilate paying of bills on consumer's instructions, inform them about power outages in advance and also tell them how long it will take for the power to get back on,” D'Souza said.

He added, “We will be able to give more artificial intelligence features only if customers register their mobile number with us. As we did not have a great response on the Mithra mobile app, we plan to create an option on the website for consumers to register their number.”