How Midco is thinking about AI to benefit customers, team

This paid piece is sponsored by Midco.

At some point in the likely not-too-distant future, a Midco customer will be able to interact digitally with a system intelligent enough to solve many common issues.

“But ahead of deploying anything, we want to make sure it fully functions before the technology interacts with our customers because the customer experience is so critical,” said Bob Bartelt, Midco’s vice president of customer experience. “We want to be sure it can truly solve problems.”

As with any public-facing technology, Midco is committed to meeting customers where they’re at, Bartelt said.

“Midco is very proud that all our front-line customer service personnel live within our five-state footprint – so if you call, you’re talking to someone in a similar geography,” he said. “With some customers, though, we find they’re looking for self-service, and they don’t want to jump on a call and talk to someone, so we can deploy really good AI in the future to limit the need to have to talk by phone if they choose.”

Think of it like a next-generation chat bot.

While messaging today can resolve some situations, an AI-powered version will serve as a greater complement to current support platforms.

“With the current system, chat bots don’t understand context,” said Kalyan Boinapalli, Midco senior vice president of IT. “If you say, ‘video’ instead of ‘TV,’ it needs to be told those are two different things. It doesn’t inherently understand it. The next evolution is powering chat bots to understand context better so a customer can interact more naturally.”

There’s real opportunity to expand AI-led support tools, whether it’s through text messaging or social media or direct message sites, added Bartelt.

In the meantime, Midco already has put emerging generative artificial intelligence to work internally. Using Microsoft Copilot, Midco teams are using the technology to enhance their work, transcribe and summarize meetings, and outline key points that can be shared with other team members.

“We’re using it to boost our productivity,” Boinapalli said. “It helps our team to automate repetitive tasks, analyze data more quickly and focus on higher-value work.”

For Boinapalli, there’s particular value in AI-assisted writing. English is his third language, “so with Copilot, I’ll highlight text and say to check it, and it does,” he said. “It helps correct sentence formation and grammar, and frees up my time to focus on other things. I also need to approve contracts, and Copilot will remind me when I have contracts pending, so it’s been very helpful.”

After first ensuring Copilot’s security, Midco is “taking a very methodical and strategic approach” with it, he added, in addition to thoughtfully training its team to work effectively with new technology.

“Just making AI tools available isn’t enough. It’s helping them understand and showing them the use cases and the best practices,” Boinapalli said.

“The security side is extremely important, and from a staffing standpoint, you need to continually learn skills because they’re rapidly changing. That adds a new dimension and makes it a priority for our team, and we’re willing to invest what it takes to help them grow their muscles related to AI.”

Bigger picture, AI also presents exciting opportunities to offer even more reliable service for customers, Boinapalli said.

“Our network is the backbone of everything we do, and with machine learning, we’ll be able to use data to predict abnormal activities, locate the potential problem or equipment and perform maintenance on it before an issue arises,” he said.

“Our goal with all technology is to improve our customers’ experiences, and AI’s potential to do that is very impressive.”