Case Study: How Pacific Gas and Electric saved 35,000 labor hours with PolyAI
Key results
The challenge
Pacific Gas and Electric, California's largest utility, fields approximately 16 million calls a year with unpredictable weather-driven spikes that pushed wait times past an hour during events. Its legacy IVR held more than 7,000 utterances, making updates slow and costly.
The solution
PG&E deployed a PolyAI generative voice agent, named Peggy, to handle service and outage queries in English and Spanish. The agent answers billing inquiries and FAQs and gives location-specific outage information, offloading volume from the legacy IVR.
The results, in context
PG&E reported 67% overall call containment, well above its initial target, alongside a 22% increase in CSAT for outage calls and a 25% reduction in customer effort compared with the legacy IVR. The deployment saved 35,000 labor hours.