Customer, digital, data, tech – it’s all in this one!

There’s nothing quite like a commitment to blogging to make you realise how quickly time flies! It’s been a busy few weeks… in amongst the madness we had a team afternoon and it was so good to spend quality time with most of the digital and projects teams. The session focussed on developing our user experience playbook and managing digital projects, but I kicked it off with a nice (fun?!) challenge to get across the importance of good communication between team members. It was a really good reminder of how important it is to take time out of the day-to-day – pic shows just how happy they all were to be doing such a thing!

Mentioning the playbook… we’re in the middle of developing a new Digital Strategy, and I was going to share some of the principles and approaches we’re going to be adopting as part of it… but we’re still doing the internal engagement with the teams and members first, so I’ll leave it for next time. What that does mean, though, is that I can focus on something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time, which is our brilliant new customer contact system Converse.

If you know about our digital work, it probably won’t come as much of a surprise that I am a fan of Netcall’s digital platform Liberty Create – and I am hoping our developers will soon write a post on some of the builds we’ve got on the go. We had significant issues with how our previous phone system was configured, and we had no access to meaningful data as a result, and so I was delighted we got the buy-in and support for investing in Netcall’s Converse, and to be the first organisation in the country to go live with it.

Netcall’s support in rolling out this new technology has been absolutely brilliant, and their approach to supporting their customers is – from our perspective – second-to-none. I honestly think this is worth mentioning because there are so many suppliers out there that get this bit wrong – and the impact is massive.

So what is it? Converse uses advanced natural language processes (AI) to understand and respond to our wide range of our customers’ queries. So, in reality this means our residents receive quick and accurate help – whether they’re calling about council services, reporting issues or needing information on something. It doesn’t matter really what they’re contacting us about, they’ll get the support they need quickly – be that online, over the phone or via a different partner organisation.

For customers, they phone us up and simply tell the system what they need, and then it responds appropriately – whether that’s offering an automated text message linking to the relevant digital service or finding the appropriate service area to receive the call. (We don’t have a centralised customer care team for all services – it was on the cards but unlikely to happen now due to LGR). If it’s a particularly busy time, the caller is offered an automatic call-back (placed in a queue – a bit like the offer you get when you’re phoning the docs, which for a full-time working mum like me is an absolutely brilliant thing!!), and our teams can manage demand in a genuinely agile way thanks to the insights they receive through dashboard information.

It integrates seamlessly with our Netcall Liberty Create platform (our low-code platform for designing and managing digital services) – and so this means we can provide a really nice joined-up digital experience for our residents. Liberty Create and the integration with Converse means that customer interactions can be automatically logged, tracked, and processed within our existing workflows, so for example:

• Customer queries received via Converse can trigger automated workflows in Liberty Create, helping us to streamline case management and service requests.
• Data captured from conversations feeds directly into our reporting systems, helping us to use feedback and insights to continuously improve service delivery.
• Residents receive a consistent and joined-up experience across all digital channels, with interactions flowing smoothly between the AI automation and human support via our great staff when it’s needed.

Another brilliant aspect of Converse worth mentioning is the analytics on customer interactions, which are now helping us identify trends, measure performance, and continually refine how we respond to residents’ needs. The insights that our teams have on call volumes, detail on reason for call, time waiting, reason for abandonment (etc etc!) has transformed how customer care is handled.

We’re already seeing some good results, such as:

50% reduction in wait times: enhanced call routing has reduced the delays residents previously encountered.

16.5% decrease in abandoned calls: with improved efficiency and shorter queues, fewer calls are abandoned, meaning that residents are receiving the support they need.

37.8% shift to online services: clear call flows and automated options encourage residents to self-serve online, reducing the dependency on traditional channels.

We’re now looking into more tagging of calls so that we can start to understand more about why people are phoning and to help those services with high call numbers and long call durations to start to shift more support, especially where it’s transactional, online.

Garden waste

A good example of a service making the most of Liberty Create and Converse is our garden waste renewal process. A huge shout out to my Transformation teams on this one because they’ve really taken an iterative approach to making sure the 2025/6 renewal process was even more responsive to user needs than last year.

The service has just under 20,000 customers, with more than 80 per cent renewing online. It’s the customer care team’s busiest time of year, but thanks to the build on Liberty and the integrations into Converse we have introduced a new dashboard for our customer services team, which provides really useful information on the number of renewals, as well as when the information was sent to the printers and when customers are likely to receive their sticker packs – further helping the customer services team to manage the additional contact over the phone.

All of this work has been led by our programme’s team, especially Amy and Lisa, who have done an impressive job of getting organisational-wide understanding and buy-in to Converse. We are now in the process of expanding Converse, with the introduction of live chat and an AI-powered chatbot. The chatbot will handle routine enquiries in real-time, improving response times and allowing staff to focus on more complex tasks or to support our more vulnerable residents in line with our ethos. We’ll no doubt do a post on this in the coming weeks!