Council & Local Authority Chatbots
Supercharge your efficiency and delight local residents.
The Opportunity For Local Authorities
A District Council support chatbot to enable residents to find the answers to their questions on their website more easily.
Reduce the need for the Customer to telephone their Contact Centre or visit Council Offices. The Council would like to increase efficiency and make costs savings whilst ensure customer service experience does not suffer
Introducing The Council Chatbot
With most councils there is a constant need to review and refresh how services are delivered to and accessed by their residents.
Contact centre, email and social media contacts can be in the 10s of thousands.
As technology develops and users become accustomed to accessing services 24/7 they need to ensure that they have the means with which to engage with the public in the most cost effective way-reserving telephone and Face to Face services for those who are unable to engage digitally.
Generally queries are dealt with via forms completed on Council Websites, via Contact Centre or by customers visiting a Council Office. A chatbot facility deployed onto a council website will divert contact away from the Customer Services, it will also help to improve the content on the website and raise the council profile.
Specifications
A chatbot solution which reduces contact to customer services team, enabling members of the public to find answers to their queries on the website 24/7.
W3C AA2.1 Compliant, will work with most websites, mobile friendly.
The chatbot must be able to cover most standard council support questions and direct users to relevant content on the website.
Branding of chatbot to match corporate website styling.
Support complex multi turn enquiries providing information based on details offered by the customer.
Utilise free text and rich UI elements to aid conversation flow and offer meaningful and accurate responses.
Ability to flag questions/words that are inappropriate and provide a suitable response.
Provide a platform where council staff can access chat transcripts, chatbot analytics and reporting.
System should meet all latest security standards for GDPR, infrastructure and cloud hosting
Our Approach
Many customer support enquiries are similar from one council to another. We created an extensive training data-set and programmed our templated chatbot solution to enable it to answer standard questions regarding council services for example Recycling and Waste, Transport and Education questions.
We analysed large sets of training data to tailor an extensive machine learning model so that the chatbot can handle the majority of standard council questions out of the box.
We then added the most advanced chatbot technology to the solution. Utilising Google Dialogflow and leveraging our expertise with dialogflow and our own APIs to create integration capabilities with existing systems. As a result a flexible automated assistant will become a must for all councils and their services.
The Solution
Natural Language Capabilities
Conversational Ability
The council chatbot solution can handle 1000s of separate intents (separate enquiries) with multiple training phrases(utterances) for each one of these.
Some FAQ type intents can be answered simply whilst others need a more complex approach to the conversation. The chatbot remembers context and asks further questions to provide more relevant answers to users.
The chatbot also provides Smalltalk and automatic spelling correction.
Graceful Handling of Errors
Chatbots will occasionally not understand a question or fail to find the appropriate answer. Its essential to handle these situations appropriately. The council chatbot solution is able to leverage specific techniques to get a user back on track: Custom fallback handlers, feedback acceptance, direct SMS/Email messages to support teams, and sentiment analysis all provide a safety net to provide the most positive user experience.
Involving Responses
The council chatbot returns text and richer UI elements such as cards, button links, images and embedded video for a richer user experience.
Chatbot Analysis
Chatbot Forge comes as standard with the council chatbot solution, enabling council staff to:
- Monitor KPI
- Reduce NLP failure rate
- Review live chat transcripts
- Identify mishandled and unhandled Intents
- NLP / Intents & Entities
- View users & session data
- Increase user satisfaction
- Reduce escalations
Integrations
The website where the chatbot will operate is still only one customer touchpoint. The council chatbot solution has multiple integration possibilities and is designed to be deployed to Intelligent IVR systems, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
