Duke Energy (OH & KY) Customer Service

I just moved into the Ohio area and need to work on signing up for all of my utilities. I'm from California, so pretty much all the utility companies are new to me. Duke Energy apparently provides both electric and natural gas to southern Ohio, so it makes sense to use the same company for both. However, I'm not sure how to get that set up online, so I thought I'd call someone and talk to them about how to get my service going quickly. 

This is the first time in a long time that I've had to change energy providers, so I don't really know what to expect. When I was searching online, I noticed they provide energy to a lot of different states, so depending on how many callers they get a day I figured I might be on hold for a while. It wasn't terrible, but I did spend at least 20 minutes on hold. Of course, we just had a bunch of snow move into Ohio, so it makes sense that they may have had outages and extra callers compared to other times of the year.

When I called, an automated assistant picked up right away and said, "Welcome to Duke Energy. Your call may be recorded. If you suspect a gas leak or smell a gas odor, say emergency. What’s the phone number on your account? You can also say, find my account another way, or I’m a new customer."

I am a new customer, so I responded "New customer", but it didn't hear me. It then gave me a list of numbered options and I chose the number that corresponded with "new customer." The system asked me, "Have you already started the process with us for setting up your new service?" I said no, and it told me I could go online for faster service. It responded, "Let’s make sure we set up the right service for you. Are you calling as a contractor, builder, business, or residential customer?" 

After I responded that I'm a residential customer, the automated assistant stated, "For faster service, I can text you a link to a website to a form that will allow you to get the service started right away. Would you like me to send that link to your phone or to an email? Or you can say no thanks." Once again, I wanted to speak to a person, so I declined. It then asked for my ZIP code before placing me on hold to talk to a customer service agent. I did have a modest wait at this point, but once I got to the actual agent I was able to set my service up swiftly.