Coventry City Council is first to join the exclusive network for local councils overwhelmed with calls about bins, Council Tax and Covid

One of the UK's leading conversational AI companies, EBI.AI, has launched a new service to help local councils struggling to cope with a high volume of repetitive calls about community services like missed bin collections and parking charges. Community AI is a cost-effective way for local councils to introduce AI assistants that can give customers the information they need instantly online, over the phone, using smart speakers, social media or mobile, whenever they want it. Public sector workers can then spend less time on routine enquiries and allocate more of their resources to dealing with complex issues that need more of their time or attention.

Community AI is exclusive to local councils. Inundated with questions like ‘I can’t pay my Council Tax this month, what do I do?’, ‘Where can I get a Covid test?’ and ‘Can I get a bigger bin?’, local councils are overwhelmed by enquiries that an AI assistant can answer instantly and with great accuracy at any time. During trials with a London borough council, EBI.AI found that 35% of the calls about Council Tax, that were handled by the AI, were picked up out of hours when the council offices weren’t even open, showing an appetite for a 24-hour service.

Community AI is powered by Lobster, EBI.AI’s conversational AI platform. And since Lobster is a managed service, public sector workers don’t have to worry about managing the technology or fret about how they’ll keep it up to date with the many strict regulations for local government that they must follow. The team at EBI.AI manages legislation of things like accessibility and making sure information is readily available to every member of a council’s community, and GDPR, which protects people’s data. Using Lobster, EBI.AI can also integrate with software systems and cloud services local councils already use, so they don't have to change any of this unless they want to.

“EBI.AI’s technology means residents can receive rapid responses to their questions at any time of the day or night,” said Customer Services at Coventry City Council. “Community AI allows us to customise the solution by adding new knowledge and questions that reflect our residents’ needs. At the same time, it captures the vital intelligence we require to improve the services that really matter to our citizens. For example, data demonstrating that parking is the most popular topic will enable us to make the relevant changes and allocate resources more effectively.”

Coventry City Council recognises that local councils up and down the country are all dealing with the same challenges and are keen to go digital, but are struggling to make it a reality. They immediately saw the benefit in joining forces with other local councils to start using AI together, moving forward faster but able to keep individual costs down, since Community AI is managed using a simple points system. Local councils in the network will decide what their customers need the most help with most often then add a response to their AI. Any other council in the Community AI network can add the same response to their AI too, so every council in the group benefits from what other councils are doing.

Matthew Doel, Managing Director at EBI.AI, concluded, “For local government organisations striving to serve their communities at reduced cost, we believe conversational AI holds the answer. Our new Community AI solution, offered as a managed service, means we do all the hard work so that our customers don’t have to. We provide a flexible platform that can grow and evolve while taking away the headaches associated with important legislation such as GDPR and accessibility. Quite simply, we put local councils in the driving seat and empower staff to build the best possible customer relationships. We are delighted to be working with Coventry City Council and hope others will soon follow their lead to create cost-effective, connected councils that benefit everyone.”

Community AI is available to join immediately. After meeting with the team at EBI.AI, local councils get a personalised demo to show them how it works. If they decide to go ahead, local councils can have their own branded AI assistant in 4-6 weeks. EBI.AI continually supervises the conversations that AI assistants are having with community members to make sure the information people get is accurate every time. Better still, the more conversations the AI assistant has with people, the more it learns about what people need from their local council, right now, which results in a better experience for everyone. Both the public sector workers wanting to serve their community as best they can and the people who use their services every day. For more information, visit the ebi website.

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About EBI.AI
Established in 2014, EBI.AI is among the most advanced UK labs to create fully managed, Enterprise-grade AI assistants. These assistants help clients to provide their customers with faster and better resolutions to their queries, and liberate front-line customer service agents from the dull, repetitive and mundane.
EBI.AI selects the best AI and cloud services available from IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and others, combined with bespoke AI models to deliver its AI communication platform, called Lobster.

Combined with it over 19 years of experience working with big data, analytics and systems integration it has successfully implemented AI assistants that now handle hundreds of thousands of conversations a year across Transport & Travel, Property, Insurance, Public and Automotive industries.

For more information, please visit EBI.AI

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