Using a Chatbot to help our customers

The Coronavirus pandemic has forced our hand when it comes to finding new, innovative ways to engage with the residents and businesses of our borough.

The closure of the Civic Centre and implementation of home working has meant we cannot presently meet face-to-face with our customers. With this in mind, our digital channels (the website, social media and email) have become a frontline for doing business with the council.

While our phone lines remain open, we really want these to be available for our most vulnerable residents, who perhaps aren’t confident or don’t have the skills to engage with us online. As such, we need to ensure we direct more of our customers to our online platforms.

But on a website with more than 1,000 webpages, it can sometimes be hard to find what you’re looking for. That’s why we’ve now implemented a Covid-19 chatbot on certain pages of our website.

The chatbot, provided free of charge by We Build Bots, provides essential signposting to users who have common queries related to Coronavirus. Our website users can simply select the topic of their request in the pop up window and they will instantly receive an automated response with answers and signposting to further guidance and reading.

Chatbots have intrigued us for a while and this has given us an opportunity to implement one onto our website, which will allow us to analyse its effectiveness and help direct the future direction of our website.