To enhance customer experience, SSE required a solution able to handle customer interactions in a conversational and nuanced way.
The company adopted Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI to build its first conversational AI virtual assistant.
With its new virtual assistant, SSE has increased positive customer reactions by 53% and intent recognition and answering by 99%.
“Microsoft’s vision to innovate aligns with ours and we’re impressed with their technologies. We’re delivering impactful innovation together.”
Phil Crannage, CIO, SSE Energy Customer Solutions
On a mission to deliver exceptional customer support, SSE is leveraging Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI to deliver its first conversational virtual assistant, helping customers solve their queries online. This is transforming how the company engages with its users, infusing efficiency into its interactions and enhancing the customer experience.
Within the energy sector, delivering a high standard of support is crucial. Customers expect hassle-free interactions – especially for billing issues and other urgent enquiries. In addition, the regulator mandates what it expects good customer support to look like.
Business customers, in particular, need a high level of information to meet their often complex and bespoke requirements. As a customer-centric business, SSE did not feel that traditional “chatbots” - which work by mapping out processes and decision trees - could support the exceptional customer service it aims to deliver.
“Our customers have very nuanced queries. Old-school, rule-based chatbots don’t deliver the very seamless, smooth experience we want. The AI had to be really strong before we could trust it was going to deliver a better experience,” explains Phil Crannage, Chief Information Officer at SSE Energy Customer Solutions. “Now, with generative AI, we recognise the new opportunity to deliver that better experience for our customers.”
SSE began building a virtual assistant using Microsoft Copilot Studio, leveraging its out-of-the-box Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities. However, answering a business customer query satisfactorily could involve multiple systems and information sources. This complexity led the SSE team to adopt Azure AI Foundry, taking advantage of the Azure OpenAI service to expand on Copilot Studio’s capabilities and deliver more nuanced responses.
SSE worked in close partnership with Microsoft to create an advanced underlying data architecture which could deliver the smooth and seamless customer outcomes and experiences desired.
“To make sure we are delivering accurate answers within our regulated industry, the question needed to draw answers from a knowledge base of different content sources,” explains Fred McArthur, an AI developer at SSE. “Then it is brought back to Azure OpenAI to generate the answer and surfaced to the client using Copilot Studio.”
For the best customer experience, SSE recognised that it needed to enable the customer to ask a question in their own words, without having to learn the company’s own taxonomy around that issue. The natural language capabilities of Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI make it possible for customers to use different phrasing and multi-faceted questions and for the virtual assistant – which SSE named Nero – to give clear, nuanced and accurate responses.
Phil Crannage explains, “People have lots of different ways of asking for the same thing. Their understanding of what they need may not match with our understanding. So, we’re using the generative AI to drive the interaction with the back-end systems as much as answering the questions. And, importantly in our regulated industry, that’s happening within a framework of guardrails that ensures answers are compliant and accurate.”
The close collaboration with Microsoft enabled SSE to follow best practice when setting up these guardrails.
Kevin Weir, Technical Product Owner at SSE, emphasises, “We have a strict regulatory framework with which we need to adhere. All our customer accounts and information must be protected. Microsoft’s guidance about the guardrails we need to set up to do this in a safe and secure way whilst also delivering a really strong product was fantastic.”
“We have a strict regulatory framework with which we need to adhere. All our customer accounts and information must be protected. Microsoft’s guidance about the guardrails we need to set up to do this in a safe and secure way whilst also delivering a really strong product was fantastic.”
Kevin Weir, Technical Product Owner, SSE
Nero, SSE’s new virtual assistant, is now embedded in the SSE website. It helps customers to view their bills and outstanding balances, pay them and query them. Customers can view their usage metrics and compare them month to month. They can also sign up to receive alerts, for example, if their usage is unusually high.
Available 24/7, Nero currently handles around 280 customer conversations each day, empowering human agents to spend more time with the customer and deal with more complex enquiries.
“Nero is a huge improvement,” says Kevin Weir. “It excels at intent recognition and answering; it understands everything our customers ask. This level of accuracy is boosting customer satisfaction and has revolutionised our customer interactions.”
Since launching Nero, SSE has seen a 53% increase in positive customer reactions within the virtual assistant. With its powerful ability to understand nuance, Nero has also eradicated missed messages and boosted intent recognition and answering by 99%.
Phil Crannage confirms, “Customers want to use the virtual assistant by choice. It’s more effective for us. It’s more effective for them. It’s good for everybody.”
SSE sees the development of Nero as an opportunity to lead the discussion within the framework of the regulated industry in which it operates.
“We need the answer to be really accurate,” explains Phil Crannage. “We cannot risk the AI making up the answer. So, we need to define the framework and ensure the search for the answer is contained. This way, we comply with a framework of rules without the process having to be rigidly rules-based. And Nero’s delivering a conversational experience.”
To do this, SSE leveraged a range of Azure AI Foundry tools and services. Using Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) functionality, SSE created a model for containing Nero’s answers successfully, ensuring compliance, accuracy and the best customer experience.
“We wanted to make Nero so good that it would be the interaction of choice; it’d be the primary way customers interact with us,” explains Phil Crannage. “We wanted it to immediately understand and respond – a true customer support agent. With Azure OpenAI, we were able to build this intelligence into Nero very easily.”
Working with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI was an attractive choice, because SSE can be confident all services are compliant with global data regulations and built on enterprise-grade network infrastructure. Furthermore, as these solutions are built using Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard, SSE can rest-assured that Nero’s responses are inclusive, bias-free and that data is kept secure.
To ensure alignment with its specific security needs, SSE worked in collaboration with Microsoft Unified to implement a multi-layered security approach.
Joshua Booth-Martin, CCAAS & AI Platform Lead at SSE, reflects, “Microsoft support has been amazing! It felt like they were a valuable part of our team, helping us to understand the art of the possible and embrace AI safely.”
For SSE, the native integration of Microsoft solutions and the speed at which new technologies are made available on the Azure platform are further strong reasons for choosing Microsoft.
Fred McArthur says, “The speed at which models are being made available, at which Microsoft has it ready in Azure within days after an announcement, means the technology is ready for us to start using straight away.”
“It’s not like we only have one place to shop. It’s just easier with Azure,” agrees Phil Crannage. “Microsoft are a good partner. They are helping to drive our adoption. The product is good. And Microsoft has been good at building their AI products into their other products, which is a good thing. It’s been important in accelerating our use of AI across the board.”
53% increase in positive customer reactions
SSE continues to innovate with AI in new ways. User metrics for Microsoft 365 Copilot run as high as 90% daily use; it’s becoming the norm to use it for the hundreds of staff who have it. The technology team is using Microsoft AI to build and deploy code, analyse requirements and build test cases. It’s helping the team to be more responsive and agile and deliver faster.
“We put the customer at the centre of everything we do, including our use of AI tools,” emphasises Phil Crannage. “We see Microsoft AI as a massive tool to be more customer-centric – whether that’s automating a back-office process or making the interaction between ourselves and the customer as easy as possible. The customer is at the heart of it.”
SSE’s AI virtual assistant serves as a blueprint for the energy sector, with its innovation using Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI delivering clear benefits in customer support. Eager to drive further customer-centric innovation, SSE plans to evolve Nero into an omnichannel solution with multimodal capabilities, providing personalised agentic analytics, voice interaction and the ability to understand scanned documents and pictures of meters.
“Our ability to service customers is enhanced by the AI,” says Phil Crannage. “We can automate more. We can speed up responses. We can be more customer-centric. We will build a whole raft of demand-side solutions to help customers take control of their usage, bring down costs and move closer to net zero.”
“Microsoft are constantly pushing forward,” adds Kevin Weir. “We’re seeing new developments from them daily, making it a fruitful partnership for us in terms of the AI solutions we’re building. We’re fortunate to have Microsoft alongside us for the journey.”
SSE is embracing an AI-first mentality, partnering with Microsoft to create an AI Centre of Excellence which will help to share best practice and deploy AI responsibly, using its own use cases to illustrate how AI can be used to solve real business challenges.
“We are true partners of Microsoft,” says Phil Crannage. “Microsoft’s vision to innovate aligns with ours and we’re impressed with their technologies. We’re delivering impactful innovation together.”
“Microsoft are constantly pushing forward. We’re seeing new developments from them daily, making it a fruitful partnership for us in terms of the AI solutions we’re building. We’re fortunate to have Microsoft alongside us for the journey.”
Kevin Weir, Technical Product Owner, SSE
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