An Innovative Approach to the Customer Experience

To close out Women’s History Month, we want to introduce you to one of our newest team members.

She’s one of the first people you’ll speak to when you call Louisville Water. She’s intelligent and getting smarter by the day. She’s also proactive and knows what you’re calling about before you say, “hello.”

She is Iva Marie – Louisville Water’s first-ever Interactive Virtual Assistant (IVA).

“Iva Marie is an AI-based service that uses large language models (LLM) and natural language understanding (NLU) to interact with customers,” said Megan Hancock, Customer Service Director.

She’s named after Marie C. Dreisman, the first known woman to work at Louisville Water as a stenographer. Stenography required high skill and was typically only performed by men at the time. But Dreisman must have been good at her job because she was given a raise by the board in 1918 due to her “increased responsibilities.” She worked at Louisville Water until her death in 1928.

Iva Marie carries on Dreisman’s trailblazing legacy by enhancing the overall customer experience.

In 2020, Louisville Water began its Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) project, upgrading all customers with advanced meters and transitioning to monthly billing.

As more customers moved to monthly billing, the overall call volume increased by 30%. In all, our customer service representatives answered 280,000 calls in 2024.

To help handle the call volume and ensure customers received the support they needed, Louisville Water’s customer service team introduced new technologies — one of which was Iva Marie in late 2024.

As the project continued, a range of new features were added, including the ability to authenticate callers using data from Louisville Water’s Customer Care & Billing database.

Once an account is authenticated, Iva Marie is then able to “inform the caller of important notifications related to the account such as a past-due amount or if the caller is about to be turned off due to non-payment,” Hancock said.

Another feature implemented last year was the ability to analyze the intent of a customer’s call and “then perform an action based on the intent.”

The action may be as simple as reading the last payment made or educating the customer on cold weather tips or preventing leaks.

“Is that what you were calling about?” Iva Marie will ask.

If the answer is no, you can speak to her like you would any representative and she’ll continue to answer your questions.

“Iva Marie is always working,” Hancock added “The self-service features and proactive notifications are available 24/7. Iva Marie is helping reduce the call volume directed to live agents by providing complete answers to customers. She will continue to learn and improve the service offering as she grows her natural language understanding.”

Since January 15, Iva Marie has answered more than 250,000 calls and saved a fourth of all calls from going to an agent. As we continue to fine tune her responses and delivery, our goal is to have her contain 30% call volume by the end of 2025 and 35% in 2026.

In addition to Iva Marie, Louisville Water plans to implement several additional AI-based initiatives this year.

“We’re deploying AI to transcribe and summarize call notes, provide live call guidance to ensure all aspects of the call are obtained accurately, and offer a chat-GPT like Q&A,” Hancock said. “We will also use LLM and NLU to score 100% of the calls for quality assurance.”

Innovation has been a part of Louisville Water’s story since the very beginning. Modern water filtration was discovered right on the banks of the Louisville Water Tower. That same innovative spirit will continue to drive the customer experience, ensuring your care is as high-quality as your drinking water.