CEMIG Autoatendimento

CEMIG is the electricity company of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and since October 2015 it has run a self-service bot on Telegram. Tecnoblog and TudoCelular covered the launch, and a CEMIG press release presented it as a channel for customers' most common requests.

The bot works through classic slash commands rather than buttons. You register once with /cadastro to link your customer details, and then each everyday task is a single command: /leitura to send your meter reading, /conta to get outstanding bills for payment, /luz to report a power cut. /menu lists everything else, including branch information, request protocols and history.

For households that report their own meter reading, sending it from a chat instead of calling the call centre or filling in a website form is the main reason to use it. Reporting an outage from the phone while the power is down is the other.

Two things to weigh. The bot is old: its command set has not visibly changed since launch, Telegram shows no public user count for it, and cemig.com.br does not link to it, so its tie to CEMIG rests on the press. And it serves only CEMIG customers in Minas Gerais, in Portuguese only.