West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire Councils

Meet ‘Norbert’ of West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire

Norbert, West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire Councils’ ‘Virtual Assistant’, now handles email queries from the county’s 450,000 residents and is set to save the unitary authorities £430,000 over three years.

The Challenge

West Northamptonshire Council and North Northamptonshire Councils are two new unitaries that have replaced the county’s eight previous councils.

A lot of the county’s residents use email as their preferred method of contact, but the old manual ways of replying, processing and actioning emails were extremely costly and resource intensive.

To keep the email channel open, an innovative solution was needed.

The Solution

The team at Northamptonshire gave ‘Norbert’ - the Virtual Assistant who had been supporting customer services at the former Northampton Borough Council - the ability to handle email queries.

Now when an email comes in, Norbert (in his new role as a Mailbot) triages the queries, reading the mail, requesting more information when needed, and assigning the case to the correct service area based on location and inquiry type.

Because Norbert is integrated with Jadu Connect (Customer Experience Management), he can raise and progress cases, working alongside the customer service team.

He also drafts responses, providing the information asked for and if confident (over 90 percent) replying directly to the customer. When he’s uncertain, he runs his suggested response past a human member of the team first.

Example: Norbert in Action

A customer emails to say “I need to report some fly tipping”.
Norbert evaluates the content and raises a case in Jadu CXM, capturing all relevant information (asking for it if need be).
Norbert determines the query is for the council’s Street Care services team.
He drafts an appropriate response drawing upon a database built on frequently asked questions. In this case he thanks the sender for bringing the fly tipping to the council’s attention and asking them to report it using the council’s online report-it tool.
As Norbert is over 90 percent certain he knows the answer, he responds directly to the customer and closes the case.

The Technical Part

When an email comes in, it is first processed through the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
It is then passed through to an Amazon S3 bucket, which captures and holds relevant data and the descriptive metadata needed to process the query.
The information is then passed through a series of Amazon Lambda functions, which contain all the code that is necessary to tell Norbert what to do with each step of the process.
Step Functions are used to see how each step in the workflow interacts with each other to make sure everything is working properly.
Norbert then passes all of this information through to the Jadu CXM database tables.
He checks in with the DynamoDB tables, which hold specific key inputs that determine the final input of Norbert's actions.
Amazon LEX is then used to determine the intents and utterances the customer is using and are all keyed and linked to the individual service areas as required.
Azure QnAMaker is used to generate Norbert’s responses.

The Result

West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire deployed Norbert in a mailbot role in two very busy new unitary authorities - and during the Covid-19 pandemic - in just nine months.

By doing so, they have enabled their email channels to remain open.

They have also massively reduced the amount of time it takes for the council to deal with email inquiries (as Norbert triages emails) improving the service for customers.

The average time required to handle an enquiry has halved (from ten mins to five minutes per email).

The solution is extremely user friendly and available 24 hours a day.

Norbert is projected to save £430k over the next three years.

West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire have open sourced and shared their work on GitHub.

What next?

“The world is Norbert's oyster. He has access to all of this useful information, and we want to make it accessible through any channel that the customer wants to use”, says Megan Crowthers, Digital Business Analyst.

“The technology has been created with the intent to develop it once and deploy infinitely. What we're looking to create is effectively a multi-channel virtual assistant that covers SMS, voice, chatbot channels and so on,” adds Andy Boatwright, Digital Services Officer.

West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire Councils