Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council

Citizen Enquiries Across All Council Services

Councils deal with an extensive volume of customer enquiries every day, the majority of which are still by telephone despite many services now being available and promoted on-line. At Doncaster, this can be 5-6,000 a week. Citizens often have to wait in a queue for a response during unpredictable peaks in demand and due to the wide range of services delivered by local authorities, it is very challenging for staff to remain multi-skilled to the required level in all services that are continually changing.

Given recent developments regarding artificial intelligence, in particular ‘bots, Doncaster Council would like to explore using a collaborative approach where this technology could be used to improve the customer experience, increase efficiency and speed up service delivery.

In particular, we would like to explore how this would work for our high volume services such as:

• Bin collection and waste recycling;
• Street cleaning and flytipping; and
• Highway and street lighting related services.

However, we would also like to explore what other services could benefit from the use of this technology learning from others.

The aim would be to produce assets that will be reusable by other local authorities. In particular, we aim to produce:

• • A discovery report that sets out the art of the possible;
  • A technical prototype;
  • A benefit realisation plan; and
  • To-Be Process Maps.