Westminster City Council offers smarter self-service with 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant

The Challenge: Increasing self-service options for customers and efficiency in the contact center

The Smart City team at Westminster works to understand how the council can create better experiences for its constituents. The team began a pilot project using conversational AI to improve self-service experiences and increase efficiency for both the public and the contact center.

“We analyzed the queries coming into our contact center,” says Roshna Al-Ajeeli, Smart City Delivery Manager, “to learn more about the type of information that users needed. We also looked at repetitive queries and ways we could ease the pressure on our contact center.”

The council had used web chatbots in the past, but these early bots could only provide basic Q&A and were not always successful in completing customer journeys. But this time, the project team wanted a truly intelligent solution that used advanced AI technology to enhance the customer experience.

When looking for a solution, the team considered a few options but quickly chose 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant (ICA) due to the council’s successful partnership with 8x8. Gordon recalls, “We trusted 8x8, but also it was 8x8’s ability to integrate ICA seamlessly into our contact center, so that if needed, things could be escalated to a live agent really easily, which would really enhance the end-to-end customer journey.”

The Solution: A chatbot that has “surpassed expectations”

The Westminster City Council decided to launch 8x8 ICA focusing on one pilot use case: simple queries related to waste management. Users would be able to ask Intelligent Customer Assistant questions around such topics as recycling, reuse, and rubbish collection.

The entire project took about three months from idea to launch, and the team conducted significant user testing to ensure the chatbot was ready for delivery. Once they were confident in its reliability and smooth user experience, implementation was quick. “Bringing 8x8 ICA to life in our environment was very easy,” says Gordon, “because it’s already integrated with our existing 8x8 Contact Center system.”

As the AI-powered technology was new for the team, they used 8x8’s online resources and worked closely with 8x8 technical support during implementation. “It’s clear that our partnership with 8x8 allowed us to deliver a chatbot that we feel is truly worth promoting to our residents,” says Gordon.

The user experience of 8x8 ICA proved to be far superior to the clunky experience of older chatbots. Users find the chatbot naturally through the council’s website, and are prompted with an option to quickly interact. “The number of queries coming into 8x8 ICA is quite high,” says Al-Ajeeli, “which has surpassed our expectations.”

Gordon concurs: “We wanted to understand how our users were interacting with the chatbot, and we see that it is answering their questions really successfully.”

The team can analyze traffic further using ICA’s reporting and the analytics features. With an easy-to-use dashboard, they’ve been able to quickly train junior staff to monitor usage and gather data. “The visibility of bot activity that we have on the backend has been great,” says Gordon, "which allows us to demonstrate the success of our project to others in the organization.”

The Results: Efficiency for constituents and agents

With 8x8 ICA, the Westminster City Council can now provide 24/7 self-service support regarding simple waste-related queries, which improves self-sufficiency for constituents and reduces calls to the contact center.

“We really look at the Intelligent Customer Assistant as something that doesn’t replace our contact center, but instead enhances the customer experience,” says Gordon. “It's a great step forward in how we assist our customers, not just during our core operating hours, because we are here to support them in their everyday life.”

The project’s success shows in the numbers. “Our 8x8 ICA has an average of 80% success rate, and sometimes even reaching 100%,” says Al-Ajeeli. The team easily tracks their metrics using an intuitive dashboard, and conducts twice-monthly reviews to identify areas for improvement. “It’s not just a bot that we deploy once and that’s it,” says Gordon. “For us, it is something that we’re going to own throughout its lifetime.”

Looking ahead, the team sees enormous potential for their ICA to handle a variety of queries. “In the next phase, we’ll look at more complex queries and we’re already looking at two more use cases. 8x8 ICA’s flexibility and configurability makes it easy for us to expand its scope.”