Comparing IVR and Grace: A New Era in Customer Support

Almost every utility contact centre has an IVR in front of it, and almost every conversation we have starts with the same question: does an AI agent replace it, or sit alongside it?

The honest answer is that it depends where you draw the line, and that the line is worth thinking about carefully rather than assuming.

What IVR does well

IVR has been the backbone of telephony self-service for decades because it is genuinely good at a specific set of things. It routes reliably. It is predictable, cheap to run, and completely deterministic — the same input produces the same result every time, which matters more in a regulated sector than it does elsewhere. For a caller who knows exactly what they want and can find it in the menu, a well-built IVR is faster than a conversation.

It is designed around selection: the caller picks from a set of known options. That is its strength, and it is also the boundary of what it can do.

What Grace does differently

Grace is built for the calls that do not fit a menu option.

She holds a multi-turn conversation — asking clarifying questions, keeping track of what has already been said, and adapting as the caller’s actual problem becomes clear. That matters because callers rarely open with the real question. “I want to talk to someone about my bill” turns out to be a payment arrangement, a move-out final bill, or a charge from a rate change, and which one it is only emerges a few exchanges in.

Underneath that, she is connected to the CIS and billing platform, so she can finish the job rather than describe it: retrieve the balance, explain the charge, take the payment, book the appointment, write the result back.

Two other practical differences:

• Concurrency. There is no queue, because there is nothing to queue for. The hundredth simultaneous caller is answered the same as the first.
• Language. English and Spanish at equal quality, switched mid-call when the caller asks, rather than as a separate menu tree.

Running both

Most deployments are not a replacement decision. The common shape is:

IVR keeps the front door. Emergency routing especially — a gas odour or a downed line should hit a deterministic path to the right team, and that is a job for a system that does exactly the same thing every time. Straightforward self-service that already works well can stay too.

Grace takes the conversations. Anything that needs context, lookup, or more than one exchange. In practice this is most of what would otherwise have ended at “please hold for the next available representative.”

Handoffs carry context. The point of integrating the two is that a caller does not repeat themselves at the boundary. Whatever the IVR collected goes with them, and whatever Grace has gathered goes to the CSR when a call escalates.

Where exactly the split falls is a per-utility decision, and it usually moves after go-live — the pattern we see is that the IVR keeps the paths where determinism is the point, and gives up the paths where it was only ever a menu standing between a customer and an answer.

What we would actually suggest

Do not start from the technology. Start from your call mix. Pull the top ten reasons people ring you, and mark each one: does this caller know what they want, or are they trying to describe a problem?

The first group is IVR’s. The second group is where an agent earns its place. Most utilities are surprised by how much of their volume sits in the second group — and that number, rather than any argument about the technology, is what decides how much difference this makes to your contact centre.