Don’t start from scratch: Council chatbot content ready to serve
Get your chatbot live ahead of schedule with inGenious AI’s foundation content
If you’ve chosen conversational AI as part of your local government customer service strategy, getting the base content together is critical. It takes a strong strategy and a time commitment – upfront and ongoing – to make sure customers get what they need.
One of the best ways to reduce the time and effort of developing your content is to leverage existing digital content. Strategic repurposing – taking content written for one purpose and using it for another purpose – can save hours of writing and editing time.
In the case of Wyndham City Council (WCC), inGenious AI were able to guide the council team on what existing content could be repurposed for the chatbot, cutting the content development lead time down by weeks. That reflects inGenious AI’s strong experience as a chatbot provider of choice for the local government sector.
Why your chatbot content is make or break
A chatbot is a great solution to managing growing call centre volume but it’s reliant on the quality and accuracy of its content.
Part of the chatbot development process is the creation or repurposing of content. As content is added to the chatbot, the AI learns and indexes the content so it can deliver the right answer at the right time to the right customer.
“The content writing was all on us, which was probably the most challenging bit of the chatbot.”
When a customer types in a trigger word the chatbot recognises the phrase and finds the most relevant entry within the system. For example, if a customer types in “bin collection day”, the chatbot understands that the customer wants to know when their bin is collected and can direct the customer to the right answer.
It can be a long and tedious process to get that content developed, optimised and ready for the chatbot to use – especially in a council setting where there are thousands of locations, assets, pieces of infrastructure and a population of 290,000 people.
As Samantha Price, Customer Experience Program Lead from Wyndham City Council notes, “the content writing was all on us, which was probably the most challenging bit of the chatbot.”
How to feed your chatbot
To get the best out of your chatbot, find and leverage existing content from your council by centralising your IP through:
- contact centre scripts
- existing web or email-based written response templates
- on hold messaging content
- industry knowledge base
- CRM data.
How Wyndham City Council developed chatbot content with help from inGenious AI
For Wyndham City Council, what could have been a mammoth task developing content became much easier with the help of inGenious AI.
inGenious AI shared content and category information from other local councils they’d worked with. More than 200 question and answer sequences were provided as a starting point. All Wyndham City Council had to do was adapt to their tone of voice and add the specifics.
Repurposing content
For information and issues specific to the Wyndham City municipality, the team were able to customise existing content from the website, call centre scripts, existing email and webchat templates, on hold messaging content and information from council subject matter experts to make the content development go even faster.
Business rules
inGenious AI helped the Wyndham City Council team to develop and refine business rules and develop a writing style and chatbot persona. They supported the Wyndham City Council team in identifying their most common request types and added an additional 200 passages to the chatbot.
“Behind every chatbot passage, there are training phrases. inGenious AI helped us a lot with those, identifying and removing duplicates,” says Samantha from WCC.
Fallbacks
inGenious AI also helped with making the chatbot more responsive to customers by implementing short fallbacks.
“If you ask the same question twice, it will go straight to a person. There’s no ‘try rephrasing it’ or ‘try and do this.’ There are probably opportunities for us to push people more in the chatbot but we’ve stayed with quite a conservative approach to have a person available because we think that’s really important,” Samantha says.
The investment of time and ever-stretched resources to do the quality content development upfront has ensured that the Wyndham City Council chatbot can act as another valued team member; a customer service first responder.
“…we’ve stayed with quite a conservative approach to have a person available because we think that’s really important”
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A case study in customer experience: Wyndham City Council
With 290,000 residents and growing, Wyndham City Council receives more than 200,000 enquiries to its contact centre each year. With a need to balance growth and resources, the council tried live webchat as an alternative to the resource-heavy contact centre. Resources were still stretched.
inGenious AI worked with the Wyndham City Council team on developing a chatbot that integrated with their existing systems to manage customer service and reduce the strain on the contact centre.
Now in place for over a year, the chatbot has content for 95% of all council issues and is resolving 70% of all queries with 90% accuracy… and growing every day.
Read more about Wyndham City Council’s experience with an inGenious AI chatbot.
Regular Council business: I need help with my bins!
As you might expect, waste collection is a huge issue for councils. New bins, damaged bins or even missed bins are the most common enquiries received by Wyndham City Council.
To streamline and contain this process into the chatbot, the following content sequence was developed.
How inGenious AI supports councils across Australia
inGenious AI have worked with local governments across Australia, supporting these essential service providers to serve their communities 24/7. We understand that a great customer experience is essential as grassroots organisations and with growing populations.
With a three-pronged approach to chatbot development, the inGenious AI team are constantly looking for better ways to create, manage and improve the chatbot experience.
We make chatbots that are easy to use, train and update that can do the customer service heavy lifting without expensive downtime or increasing budget.
inGenious AI know their stuff and they’re happy to share so you can serve your community better
The chatbot that gets compliments
Wyndham City Council has had their chatbot operating for more than a year now, and they’re thrilled with the results.
“We’ve had compliments that our chatbot is amazing. I’ve encouraged people to try and trip the chatbot up. They’re often pleasantly surprised when they can’t!” says Samantha.
Even when traffic spikes, the chatbot is there to help people get up-to-date information quickly when they need it most, allowing Wyndham City Council to deliver great service to their ratepayers.
“We’ve had compliments that our chatbot is amazing. I’ve encouraged people to try and trip the chatbot up. They’re often pleasantly surprised when they can’t!”
“Mark (Co-Founder) had a lot of time for us. It was clear they could deliver what we needed and that it was working for other councils,” says Samantha.
“inGenious AI has delivered a really effective chatbot on a user-friendly platform. They’re responsive, improving the platform constantly, and even as a smaller council we had a voice.”
Easy to use, manage and update chatbots to help you serve your community around the clock.
Book a demo for your council to see it for yourself.
