78% customer self-service adoption rate - portal and mobile app
sustained across customer service and field operations
shift from reactive dispatch to predictive scheduling
THE PROBLEM
For a gas distribution company serving 45,000 connections, two problems were compounding each other quietly. The first was visible: a call center absorbing an unsustainable volume of routine inquiries - balance checks, payment confirmations, service request status, outage updates. Every one of those calls was handled by a trained customer service employee who could have been solving something that actually required human judgment. Instead, they were a manual lookup system.
The second problem was less visible but more expensive. Field maintenance teams operated reactively — dispatched to failures rather than preventing them. Paper-based inspection processes meant documentation happened after the fact, safety compliance required manual assembly of records, and there was no system to flag aging infrastructure before it became an incident. In a gas distribution context, reactive maintenance isn't just a cost problem. It's a safety risk.
Key friction points before SMART360
"Our call center was overwhelmed with routine customer inquiries while our field teams were stuck in reactive maintenance cycles. We needed to fundamentally transform our customer engagement model."
— Customer Service Director, Gas Distribution Company
The solution the Gas Distribution Company needed required two things working together: a customer-facing self-service layer that could deflect the majority of routine call volume, and a field operations system that could shift maintenance from reactive to predictive. Most platforms addressed one or the other. SMART360 addressed both through a unified platform, meaning customer interactions, field dispatch, maintenance history, and compliance documentation all lived in one system rather than three disconnected ones.
The 12-week implementation timeline, longer than the electric cooperative's 8 weeks, reflected the scope of the change. This wasn't a billing upgrade. It was a fundamental shift in how customers interacted with the utility and how field teams operated. A phased rollout meant staff weren't asked to change everything at once, and the sandbox training environment gave customer service teams confidence before the portal went live.
SMART360 MODULES USED
The Gas Distribution Company deployed SMART360 across five operational areas, each one directly targeting a specific source of cost, safety risk, or customer friction.
THE IMPLEMENTATION
A 12-week implementation for a 45,000-connection gas utility represents a deliberate pace, fast enough to deliver value quickly, structured enough to ensure every team arrived at go-live with confidence rather than uncertainty. The phased approach started with understanding before configuring, and training before launching.
RESULTS
The call center calls were absorbed by a self-service portal that customers chose to use at a 78% adoption rate. That's not a deflection metric. It's a signal that customers preferred the digital experience once it existed. The call center didn't get quieter because customers stopped having questions. It got quieter because the questions now had a better answer than a phone queue.
The maintenance cost story is the one that compounds over time. A 41% reduction isn't achieved by doing the same work more cheaply — it's achieved by doing less emergency work because predictive scheduling caught problems earlier. For a gas utility, that difference has safety implications that don't show up in a cost line but matter significantly to regulators, insurers, and the communities served.
Compliance reached 99.7% and the reporting process that used to consume significant staff time dropped by 76%. Digital inspection records, photo documentation captured in the field, and automated compliance report generation turned a manual assembly process into a review process. Skilled engineers who spent time formatting regulatory submissions now spend that time on infrastructure planning.
With call volume stabilized and maintenance costs structurally reduced, the Gas Distribution Company's roadmap focuses on extending the gains already in place. Predictive maintenance algorithms continue to improve as more inspection data flows through the system, each completed job adds to the model that determines when the next one should be scheduled.
The customer portal, now at 78% adoption, has headroom to become the primary service channel for commercial accounts that currently still rely on phone-based service. And the compliance infrastructure built for current regulatory requirements is the same foundation that accommodates new mandates without requiring a new implementation. The $2.4M in annual savings isn't a ceiling. It's a floor.
