Barking & Dagenham Council’s AI assistant means “costly phone calls” are down 6% and customer satisfaction is up 67%

The world of chatbots and AI can be overwhelming, especially for organisations exploring digital transformation for the first time. A local council like Barking & Dagenham (B&D) needs to serve many different departments too, so being able to launch one of our advanced AI assistants on their website that was “exactly tailored to the council and its customers” was a huge help.

They launched an AI assistant quickly. At first, focused on waste queries like ‘My bin wasn’t collected’, ‘When is my collection day?’, and ‘I want to arrange a green garden waste collection’. B&D gets more than 40,000 of these types of enquiries every month by phone and email. They estimate every one costs them around £4.80.

It was vital B&D found a way for their customers to self-serve, but also “reduce the number of phone enquiries and relieve some pressure on the council’s customer service team – without reducing the quality of the service.” They saw many positive outcomes that could come from this:

• More time and resource being “spent on complex problems where residents need the council most”
• Teams being able to “better serve those who have complex needs or are unable to use a computer”
• Supporting “more residents without increasing fixed costs”
• Offering a “more efficient service delivery”
• And “improve user experience”