For those in the front line dealing with customer contact, it’s a reasonable bet that the next few months will throw up some significant challenges as each public and private sector organization works out how to apply rapidly changing guidance from central government to its venues, services and processes.

The government announcement of 10 May followed by the more detailed guidance implies substantial changes to venues, services and processes. This degree of change and uncertainty brings with it peaks and troughs in contact volume.

So, how do we maintain service levels in these circumstances? One answer is an automated conversational interface. The Oracle Digital assistant answers the majority of your customer’s questions and the remainder are handled by a customer service agent. You might think that such a system would have to be maintained with questions specific to each locality. That’s where our community questions come in, relieving you of most of the work and getting the system up-and-running very quickly. Calderdale Council found that they could answer over 80% of incoming queries about changing services due to Covid-19 using this technique.

We will be discussing and showing you how the technology works and how we can reduce the pressure on your agents while improving customer service.

Guest Speakers include:

Toni Kershaw, Customer Access Manager for Calderdale Council where she has worked for over 14 years. She is responsible for customer contact across all channels as well as being the digital lead for Customer Services.

Toni was an early adopter of Web Chat in Local Government and Calderdale Council was one of the first Local Authorities in the country to implement a 24/7 chat solution. They have since that implementation had even more success complimenting that service with an automated virtual assistant.

She is passionate about customers having a choice of access channels that suits them and firmly believe in doing the basics brilliantly.