Meet Monty! Monmouthshire County Council supports its citizens with an AI Assistant, called Monty!
About the Client
Monmouthshire County Council is the governing body for the Monmouthshire principal area – one of the unitary authorities of Wales. The current unitary authority was created in 1996 and covers the eastern three-fifths of the historic county.
Project background
Always striving for innovative approaches to citizen services, Monmouthshire County Council engaged Logicdialog to discuss the deployment of a bilingual (English and Welsh) chatbot.
Serving a rural and aging population of around 100,000, it was deemed that a simple, self-serve digital channel would prove popular among Monmouthshire’s residents, and free up council resources to support the regions’ most vulnerable.
‘Something that our Community Hub staff talk about is that Monty can deal with the missed bin collections so their time is freed up to find a homeless person a home. We need to continually drive efficiency, which Monty will enable us to do’
- Abigail Barton, Communications & Engagement Manager
The project
Logicdialog agreed that a chat bot would be a great way to expand the choice of digital channels on offer to Monmouthshire’s constituents. Having gained an understanding of Monmouthshire’s highest volume, lowest value inbound traffic types, Logicdialog set about designing conversation flows and integrations that would automate service lines such as waste and environmental services, education, highways and local information.
A ‘town hall’ was set up to gain citizen feedback on the chat bot, and a Twitter poll was held to vote on a name for the chat bot. The name chosen was Monty! Both initiatives proved a great way to raise awareness of Monmouthshire’s new channel, and Logicdialog has since recommended similar tactics are used by all of our clients.
The results
Since the launch of Monty 3 years ago, there has been an overwhelmingly positive response from the citizens of Monmouth, and Monty has featured in many local press articles and social media posts.
Monty has managed to handle 250,000+ conversations and has processed more than 1 million messages for the citizens of Monmouth.
As an example of how successfully ‘Monty’ has dealt with citizen enquiries...
Monmouthshire typically takes 50,000 calls per year. Around 54% of these calls are related to waste and environmental services. That’s a total call volume of 27,000 relating to this topic. Monty has successfully answered (and therefore deflected away from call and email) 83% of these enquiries. In real terms, that’s 22,000 less waste related calls and/or emails coming into the contact centre. At an industry rate of £1 per call minute, and 5 min call time, this represents a saving of £110,000 per year.
22,000 less calls or emails, equating to a £110,000 saving and 1833 hours returned to the contact centre per annum.
More importantly, Monty has given time back to the contact centre, and that time is being used to support society’s most vulnerable...
In short, Monty is doing the ordinary, so that Monmouthshire County Council’s teams can do the extraordinary...
'Our organisation deals with a lot of complex issues. Logicdialog gives us the opportunity to deal with thousands more queries 24/7/365 in a cost-effective way, freeing up our front-line staff to deal with the things where people in our communities really need a human response.'
Matthew Gatehouse, Head of policy & governance
22,000 less calls or emails, equating to a £110,000 saving and 1833 hours returned to the contact centre per annum.
