AI Meets AMI: Grace's Role in Smart Meter Success at PSE&G
By Dial AI · November 18, 2024
Grace handled more than 10,000 calls during PSE&G's advanced metering rollout, booking an appointment for 65% of engaged callers, with zero queue time and support in Spanish.
PSE&G set out to replace more than two million meters as part of their Advanced Metering Infrastructure programme. Most customers moved across without difficulty. The remainder — households that had gone more than two years without scheduling an exchange — are the hard part of any rollout, and the part that decides when it finishes.
Grace was brought in to work that queue.
From off-hours to peak
Grace started on off-hours calls only. Queue times during business hours stayed high enough that PSE&G widened her remit to take between 20% and 80% of calls at peak, depending on load. That flexibility is the point: the volume in a meter exchange programme is not steady, and staffing to the peak is what makes it expensive.
What the numbers looked like
Over the first stretch of the deployment:
- More than 10,000 calls handled, over 5,000 of them in a two-week period.
- 900 calls in a single day at peak.
- About 60% of calls fully automated — greeting to booked appointment, no human involved.
- The other 40% went to a person or a scheduled callback.
Booking rate, which is the metric that matters
An exchange programme is not measured in calls answered. It is measured in appointments on the calendar.
Grace booked an appointment on 35% of all calls she took. Adjusting for accounts that could not be booked at all, that is 65% of engaged callers — comfortably ahead of the benchmark the programme was measured against.
She also books faster, in roughly half the handling time, and that comparison excludes queue time entirely. Grace’s queue is always zero, because there is no queue.
Spanish
Support for Spanish was added during the deployment and handled over 400 calls in its first week, at success rates comparable to English. A caller who asks for Spanish is switched immediately, mid-call, rather than transferred to a separate line and made to wait.
The wider point
A meter exchange campaign is an unusually clear test. The task is narrow, the outcome is binary, and there is a human benchmark sitting right next to it. It is a fair place to ask whether an AI agent is actually doing the work or simply absorbing calls — and on the measure that decides whether the programme finishes, it did better than the benchmark.