37%
reduction
in email volumes
21%
improvement
in CSAT scores
19%
improvement
in FCR
Electric Ireland, Ireland’s largest energy provider with over 1.3 million customers, faced mounting customer service pressures during the global energy and cost-of-living crises. Handling up to a million calls per year alongside hundreds of thousands of emails and chats, their traditional reporting and QA systems left them constantly reacting to issues weeks after they occurred.
To tackle this, Electric Ireland partnered with EdgeTier, implementing Agent Assist for contact routing and Conversion Insights for visibility and real-time speech and text analytics. This collaboration enabled Electric Ireland to keep their eyes and ears on every customer interaction, cut contact volume by solving issues sooner, while also giving agents, managers and the wider business immediate insight into customer pain points.
- Industry: Utilities
- Customer interactions: 28K per month
- Integrations: EdgeTier Assist
“We thought at the time that we were putting the customer at the fore. We thought we were doing things right. But in hindsight, we really weren’t because we had no real-time insights whatsoever into customer issues.” Debbie Duggan, Contract Manager for Customer Solutions, Electric Ireland
Challenges:
Delayed visibility into customer issues
Electric Ireland’s QA and insights teams relied on manual sampling – listening back to calls and reading through emails or chats long after they happened. Reports landed monthly, meaning any pattern spotted could already be five to seven weeks old. Leaders often had to rely on floor-walking or anecdotal agent feedback instead of reliable, timely data.
Surging contact volumes during the energy crisis
The energy and cost-of-living crises drove demand to unprecedented levels. Residential calls rose by 35% between 2021 and 2022, and then another 28% by 2023. Emails and chats spiked too, stretching service levels well beyond targets: what had once been a 24-hour email response time ballooned into 10–15 day delays. Customers naturally followed up, which created even more contact pressure. The impact? CSAT scores and FCR dropped significantly.
Operational complexity
Electric Ireland’s operation is large and layered:
- Around 300 residential agents
- Multiple specialist teams
- An outsourced service partner.
Each queue had different SLAs and KPIs, but without live visibility across them, leaders couldn’t easily prioritise improvements. Even measurement itself was patchy – some partners tracked productivity by login time to the telephony system, which had little connection to real customer outcomes.
“CSAT plummeted. Absolutely dropped through the floor, to levels we had never seen before. And rightly so, because we weren’t able to react to the customer’s issues in a timely manner.” Debbie Duggan
Solutions:
Real-time issue detection and response
EdgeTier’s anomaly alerts meant Electric Ireland could finally spot issues as they emerged – whether a portal outage or payment failure – rather than days or weeks later. Agents received scripts immediately, so customers got clear, confident answers on the first call.
Eliminating wasted effort
A hidden drain on productivity turned out to be spam. With EdgeTier’s Agent Assist and Conversion Analytics, the team uncovered the true scale of irrelevant emails sitting in queues and introduced auto-delete rules. This freed agents from needless work and cleared backlogs more quickly.
Raising quality and agent performance
The limited QA sampling was replaced with a complete view of agent performance across all interactions. EdgeTier’s sentiment analysis gave managers insight into whether a customer was frustrated or confused and helped spot trends in agent conversations that negatively impacted CSAT. Leaders can now identify who needs coaching and who is excelling. Plans to move to automated QA will take this further, providing a true picture of quality and removing the need for manual scoring.
Tackling repeat contacts
“12% of customers are responsible for 80% of contact,” Debbie told us. Analysis showed that a small percentage of customers generated a disproportionate share of interactions. By surfacing these cases, teams could reach out directly, resolve the root cause, and prevent further unnecessary contact.
An example of EdgeTier’s anomaly detection in action
Results:
- 37% reduction in email volumes
Largely driven by spam elimination, improved processes, and targeting repeat contacts. Agents no longer waste time on irrelevant queries, freeing capacity for higher-value interactions. - 19% improvement in First Contact Resolution (FCR)
With real-time alerts and better visibility, agents can resolve issues on the spot instead of escalating or promising call-backs. This directly cuts down on repeat contacts. - 21% improvement in Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Faster responses, clearer information, and fewer delays meant customers felt heard and supported – reversing the steep decline during the energy crisis.
- The contact centre as a strategic hub
No longer just a service channel, Electric Ireland’s contact centre now provides the wider business with reliable, real-time customer insight. Teams across QA, customer insights, and journey mapping use Watchtower to guide decision-making and continuous improvement.
“We’re not basing anything on anecdotal evidence anymore… with EdgeTier we feel we have the true picture of what’s really happening in the contact centre and on the ground with our customers.” Debbie Duggan
Electric Ireland transformed their contact centre into a source of real-time insight. Want to see how EdgeTier can do the same for your business?
