RG&E and NYSEG now analyse every customer service call

What happened

RG&E and NYSEG, the New York utilities serving customers across the Rochester and upstate New York regions, have begun using new technology to analyse every call that comes into their customer service centres. Rather than sampling a fraction of interactions as is typical in call-centre quality assurance, the companies say the system reviews the full volume of customer calls.

The move, reported by 13WHAM-TV, marks a shift from traditional spot-checking of agent performance toward continuous, comprehensive monitoring of customer interactions. Full details of the underlying technology provider have not been disclosed in the reporting, but the stated purpose is to give the utilities a more complete picture of how customers experience their service calls.

Why it matters

Utilities are not usually early movers in customer experience technology, which makes this deployment notable. Call-centre analytics have existed for years, but most operators still rely on sampling a small percentage of calls — often because full-volume review was too costly or labour-intensive to run at scale. Doing this for every call signals that the economics and capability of speech and conversation analytics have matured enough for essential-service providers, not just consumer brands, to adopt them.

For leaders in experience and digital transformation, this is a useful marker of where AI-enabled quality monitoring is heading: from spot-checks to continuous, systemic visibility into service delivery. That shift changes what "quality assurance" can mean in a call centre — moving it from a sampling exercise aimed at catching outliers to a data source that can reveal patterns across an entire customer base.

The Renascence take

The headline detail here isn't the technology itself — it's the shift from sampling to total coverage, and what utilities choose to do with that visibility.

Most organisations treat call monitoring as a compliance or coaching tool, scored against a handful of calls a month. Full-volume analysis is a different proposition entirely: it surfaces systemic friction — the recurring question nobody has fixed, the policy that generates repeat calls, the moment in the script where sentiment consistently drops — rather than just isolated agent mistakes. For a utility, where customers can't choose a different provider and often call under stress about essentials like billing or outages, that systemic view matters more than agent scoring ever did. The real test for RG&E and NYSEG won't be the technology's rollout; it will be whether the insights change upstream processes — billing design, outage communication, self-service options — rather than simply generating more detailed agent report cards.