Completely free COVID19 support bot

SDS recently caught up with Paul Shepherd, CEO of We Build Bots, to find out how they are supporting Local Authorities and the wider Public Sector with their COVID 19 bot. We thought it might be helpful to share what Paul explained to us:

We Build Bots (WBB) has always delivered citizen service automation to the Public Sector through bots and voice experiences (think Alexa and Google Home). We pride ourselves on saving organisations time and money while helping them deliver exceptional citizen services, but recent global developments have truly tested our ethos – and our technology; and we’re proud to say we have stepped up to the plate. Our platform has seen huge growth in traffic since COVID19 became a real concern among UK citizens (as per the chart below), with major spikes in conversations around public health. So we have created a dedicated, completely free COVID19 support bot which answers key questions about the virus, Government guidelines, best practices, and Authority specific responses to the outbreak.

graph showing a huge increase in queries during March 2020

Increasingly however we’ve been asked to offer additional support across a wider array of service lines such as waste, public health, education and taxes. So again the team rose to the challenge with what we’ve called ‘Signpost’. Signpost is a web based chatbot that can be deployed within minutes, and can conversationally direct your web visitors to the information they need. Signpost is having a substantial impact on reducing call volumes, and has been deployed across 12 Local Authorities to date. West Berkshire are among those deployments, and recently summed up the benefits we’re delivering…

The bot uses the information on our website to signpost, streamlining user experience, decreasing dwell time and having an impact on call centre volumes. Last week it was being used 50-60 times per hour!

As well as links to all Council service lines, Signpost includes in-depth information on COVID19, meaning it covers many of your citizen’s needs without them having to call or email in – relieving pressure on massively stretched Local Authority frontlines.

WBB has agreed to build, test and provide the codebase (which can be pasted to a website in seconds) for 90% less than our core product, IntelAgent. Customers have access to an admin panel where they can edit the contents of their bot, plus an analytics dashboard to view user numbers, key topics, peaks and troughs that help you understand citizen behaviour during these unprecedented times. Unusual times call for unusual measures, and it’s certain alien for a company of our size to give away our core code or slash our prices so drastically but we’ve supported the Public Sector’s digital transformation for 3 years now and we’re committed to continuing that support over the coming months at all costs. Hopefully one of the products mentioned in this post can help you and your citizens in some small way.

#automation #covid19 #coronavirus #chatbots #public sector #bots