Due to a continuous flow of questions from citizens, local entrepreneurs and permit holders, municipality Veenendaal is taking a forward-looking step with the deployment of an AI chatbot. Inge Lucas, online services and participation specialist at the municipality of Veenendaal, talks about her experiences with the deployment of a chatbot within the organization. After a period of experimentation and learning, the chatbot is a success.
author: Inge Lucas
Since late June, chatbot Bo has been ready for Veenendaal municipality's website visitors, kicking off its mission to improve customer contact. "The increasing flow of phone calls and unwanted channel switches were major challenges within the Customer Contact Center (KCC)," Lucas explains. "Our goal was to reduce phone calls by answering questions online. With chatbot Bo, we succeeded. Thanks to the chatbot, the municipality's KCC has been further relieved of the burden and digitized."
Every day the KCC receives about 400 telephone calls from residents, business owners and civil society organizations. A significant portion of these involve recurring, simple questions that can be quickly automated.
Thanks to the user-friendliness of Watermelon's Conversational AI platform, the bot is easy to deploy for a wide range of customer queries. This is exactly what the municipality of Veenendaal chose to do. Chatbot Bo has a wide range of topics and guides visitors to the right answer via buttons in the conversation. The chatbot answers all questions about civil affairs, such as extending a passport, relocating, getting married in Veenendaal, or requesting a birth certificate and extract.
In the coming period, other service tasks will be introduced step by step, so that in the future the bot will provide support on every spectrum. "With the chatbot, we as an organization are moving with the digitization of customer contact and offering our visitors faster service 24/7," Lucas explained. "And that's what we want."
The relevance of the chatbot was always clear. However, the municipality did fear a complicated implementation process. However, this did not turn out to be so bad for Lucas and her team. "We started the adventure blank and along the way we drastically changed the concept in a number of ways," Lucas says. "Municipal services turned out to be a lot more complex than those of most commercial organizations. Questions are not very diverse with us; how someone can renew their passport or apply for a driver's license is much the same. As a result, the bot initially did not give the right answers, but now the bot is more scripted. This allows us to guide visitors to the right answer through buttons."
Initial results are promising. Per week, chatbot Bo helps about 150 visitors. Lucas: "We clearly see an increase in the number of conversations through the chatbot. Whether all of these people would otherwise have contacted the municipality by phone is yet to be determined exactly, but it is clear that we have already helped many people this way."
So Lucas heartily recommends that other municipalities also explore the possibilities of a chatbot. "You don't have to have the plan fully laid out to get started," Lucas says. "You learn by doing, which is also fun. With us, we did find that experimentation and innovation go hand in hand."
