How Rivers Agile Reimagined IT Support for a Major Energy Company

CNX Resources, one of the region’s top natural gas companies, set out to transform its internal IT support. Leadership sought a deeper shift: one that would instill deeper trust in IT, improve responsiveness across departments, and lay the foundation for a future powered by AI. To achieve that, CNX partnered with Rivers Agile to reimagine how tier 1 and 2 IT support is accomplished.  

The Pittsburgh-based technology consultancy introduced a modern model for support: embedded IT professionals, equipped with agentive AI tools and guided by a culture-first approach. Together, CNX and Rivers Agile are demonstrating what the future of IT support can look like. 

Building Trust Through Expertise and Relationships  

IT support exists to keep employees productive and make operations run smoothly. To achieve this requires credibility, responsiveness, and consistency. Introducing a new team into an organization raises the level of difficulty as team members only have a brief window of time to learn processes, build relationships, and outperform the prior team.  

Before engaging a new team, Rivers Agile conducted a 60 day engagement to understand the current state, analyze performance, gather voice of the customer data, harvest knowledge documents, and make recommendations for the future state process and team.   

Rivers Agile also included development of an Agentive AI technology trained on CNX's knowledge and ticket data intended to speed the learning curve of new team members and drive consistency of ticket resolutions. This tool proved highly effective during onboarding, helping new additions contribute quickly and confidently.  

One of the key findings of this discovery engagement is that CNX office and field staff simply want their technology to work and do not want to be burdened with process barriers or support staff who are difficult to reach.  

When it came time to on-board the new team, Rivers Agile assigned experienced support staff–no juniors–with equal measures in technical skill and relationship building. They were placed directly inside CNX offices, distributed across different floors and regional offices so they can focus on the users in closest proximity to them. While all the usual channels for submitting issues remained available to users (email, phone, web based ticketing system), users were encouraged to stop by and speak with their technician face to face. Simply put, effective service is built on relationships first.  

CNX has already seen a rise in staff confidence, direct engagement between IT staff and department head leaders, and a shift in how end users interact with support.  

Future coverage will highlight the quantifiable outcomes and showcase measurable impact.  

Laying the Foundation for Scalable AI  

Transformation doesn’t begin with technology alone. Before AI could be meaningfully deployed, the operational environment needed to be modernized.  

Rivers Agile led a full-scale readiness initiative to prepare the company’s data and culture.  Platforms were standardized to create consistency across teams.   

This foundational work was essential to enabling more advanced technologies down the road. It also demonstrated how cultural investment and technical execution go hand in hand.   

“Our vision for modernized IT support included an emphasis on reducing non-productive time (NPT) for all field operations, where revenue is generated. Additionally, we knew that implementing agentive AI would have a dramatic effect on decreasing issue resolution times and push CNX into receiving proactive technical support," said Ben Wilson, CEO and Founder of Rivers Agile  

A Model Designed for Long-Term Growth