Hillingdon London Borough Council manages high volumes of calls as it supports enquiries from local residents about critical services, such as housing, waste collection, road repairs, and more. Despite making improvements to online support capabilities, the Council continued to receive an increasing number of calls. This strained the contact centre during times of peak demand, for example, when the waste collection day changed in some areas and prompted a surge of calls from people seeking more information. The Council’s plan was to improve services for residents—and give them access to important information 24/7 by way of modernising services so that efficiencies would follow doing the right thing. This led the Council to realise they needed to deploy more modern, efficient solutions.
To maintain high-quality service levels and find the efficiencies described above, the Council engaged AWS Partner PwC to bring digital transformation to its call centre using the power of Amazon Connect and artificial intelligence (AI). PwC deployed a conversational, AI-powered call-and-web-chat facility to automate calls and give residents faster answers to frequently asked questions.
The AI-powered solution helps fortify the contact centre resources, supporting existing teams by adding the equivalent capacity of another 26 full-time employees. This means enquiries can be handled faster and agents are available to focus more time on resolving complex or time-sensitive resident concerns.
Using sentiment analysis within the solution, the Council can identify when a resident needs extra assistance, understand call success rates, and help improve operations at the call centre in the future. It also monitors call completion times and data consumption to assist call centre managers in determining if residents’ needs are being met. Handling more than 30,000 phone enquiries, the system delivers an improved service in a more efficient way.
And the Council continues to innovate, seeking new ways to leverage the cloud to serve its residents better—getting residents the information they need when they need it, so they can get back to enjoying their day.
