Support volume for a utility or telecom provider is not steady. It arrives in two kinds of wave. The first follows an outage, when thousands of people want the same answer within an hour. The second follows a billing cycle, when everyone opens a bill on the same day and a fraction of them do not understand a line on it.
Both waves are predictable, and both are largely answerable without a person.
The teardown: the outage wave
An outage generates enormous contact volume for a single piece of information: is it known, and when will it be fixed. Every message asking that question crowds out the customer with a genuinely different problem, such as a vulnerable person without power or a business without connectivity. IT providers see the identical pattern, described in outage questions that flood an IT provider at once.
What customers ask during an outage
Whether there is a known fault at their address, what the estimated restoration time is, whether it affects their area or just them, whether they need to do anything such as restart equipment, whether they will be compensated, how to report a fault and whether they can get an update when it is fixed.
Status information is the answer
A live status page with postcode-level information, updated as engineers report, answers most of the wave. An assistant answering from it, at any hour, converts thousands of individual messages into self-service.
Customer: Is there an outage in my area? Assistant: The service status page shows current known faults by area, including the estimated restoration time where one has been given. If your address is not covered by a known fault, the team can raise it, so I can pass your details to them.
The billing wave
Billing questions cluster after each cycle. Most concern the same few things: a higher than expected amount, a charge the customer does not recognise, a change in tariff or a pro-rata period after a move or upgrade.
Explaining charges without accessing accounts
A website assistant cannot see a bill. What it can do is explain what each charge type means, how pro-rata billing works, why a first bill differs and how to read the statement. That answers a large share of the wave without touching account data.
Meter readings and usage
A steady stream of contact concerns meter readings, smart meter problems and usage that seems too high. Explaining how to submit a reading, what an estimated bill means and why usage varies seasonally answers most of it. Customers who understand an estimate are far less likely to dispute the next bill, and those who can submit a reading easily generate fewer corrections later.
Vulnerable customers
Some outages are a serious risk, for people dependent on medical equipment or without heating. Priority registers and urgent routes must be prominent and must never be buried behind a status page.
Business customers
Businesses affected by an outage have contractual questions about service levels and compensation, which belong with account management, in the way described in enterprise procurement questions on a B2B website.
Switching and new connections
Alongside the waves, there is steady traffic about joining, switching and moving home, which behaves like the subscription questions described in AI assistant for a subscription business and the technical questions in technical pre-sales questions that stall B2B deals.
Getting started
Publish live status, explain every charge type in plain words and let customers check at any hour. SpideyChat for B2B and service providers answers from those pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about handover on the features page.