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5 min read
11th Oct 2022
Barking & Dagenham Council (B&D) initially signed up for an AI assistant to tackle an overwhelming number of enquiries about missed bins and waste collection.
B&D booked a call with us to find out how launching an AI assistant could help and just six months later, missed bin enquiries were being automated, saving the council tens of thousands of pounds.
A few years ago, launching an AI assistant would have taken B&D months to plan, a hefty budget and a dedicated tech team ― luxuries local government doesn’t have. Our unique platform takes that demand away:
All anyone needs to get started is a website url ― it’s that simple!
Before launching their AI assistant, B&D wanted to find a way to reduce phone enquiries, but didn’t want to reduce the quality of their service. They hoped using an AI assistant would help them:
B&D chose a name for their AI assistant and a custom avatar, and have full control over every response it sends out to their local community, which can be edited any time.
Everything B&D needs to check their AI assistant’s progress is on their client dashboard:
B&D were excited to discover their AI assistant can handle scheduling enquiries like these from start to finish:
To handle these enquiries independently, the AI assistant was trained to first ask for the customer’s postcode. Using a simple integration, it can then query the council’s back-office systems to return the customer’s next bin collection date. 98% of these kinds of enquiries are now fully resolved using just the AI assistant.
B&D quickly reported a 6% reduction in calls about missed bins, so the AI assistant was trained to answer enquiries for another five departments on all sorts of topics from council tax and housing, to births, deaths and marriages. This soon highlighted the most popular topics in each area, like parking ticket disputes, visitor parking, and missed bins, so the council now knows where to focus its resource. The best part is, it didn’t cost them any more to use the same AI assistant to take on more departments and tasks.
Only 20% of customers reported successfully using the B&D website to resolve their query, yet in its first six months, the B&D AI assistant handled 18,400 enquiries from customers and 87% of those were successfully resolved, meaning the AI assistant understood their request correctly AND gave them a helpful answer without any input from the B&D contact centre team. The early success rate exceeded all expectations.
In its first nine months the B&D AI assistant had 21,000 conversations with customers. The council saw people quickly gain confidence with using it and the AI assistant started to average 3,280 meaningful conversations with residents every quarter. This number will only continue to go up, the more the AI assistant is trained to do.
Having an AI assistant online all through the day and night quickly showed B&D 35% of their queries come in outside of their office hours. They want customers to be able to contact them at a time most convenient for them, and getting to know customer preferences through the use of AI means B&D can quickly adapt their services to suit, increasing customer satisfaction.
The B&D contact centre gets 40,000 customer queries a month and in six months their AI assistant handled 10,000 of those ― that’s a massive saving on council spending. B&D allocated resource to automating more tasks like applications for visitor parking and the contact team now has more time to focus on sensitive enquiries or difficult issues where customers appreciate the human touch.
Our team of conversation analysts are continually reviewing conversations between B&D residents and their AI assistant, looking for patterns to see where improvements can be made.
Conversation review helps guide decisions the council makes, showing where services can improve and what takes priority. All they have to do is accept (or reject) our suggestions on the platform.
B&D’s return on their investment (ROI) is 533% and the more people use the AI assistant for the increasing number of tasks it can do, the more the council expects this figure to go up.
Since call numbers have decreased dramatically, B&D is now looking at ways to decrease email volume too, which will also increase ROI.
It’s easy to use our AI Studio to create and manage your own AI assistant, or you can choose our managed service and ask us to do it all for you. AI assistants are now used across public and private sectors to transform customer support, and every organisation is different.
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