For Local Government
Digital Service Transformation

Reduce inbound call volumes with Hybrid AI Live Chat

A beautifully designed, fully WCAG 2.2 AA compliant, UK-hosted platform. Triage citizen queries instantly, 24/7, and seamlessly hand off complex casework to your human team.

  • Fact-based AI responses: Answers constrained strictly to your approved PDFs and website data (RAG).
  • Smooth human escalation: Routes high-priority queries directly to specific department queues.
  • Uncompromising compliance: 100% UK data sovereignty and full WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility.

Used by progressive authorities. E.g. Gloucester City Council equivalents deflect up to 60% of Tier 1 calls via pre-chat routing.

Navigating extreme contact demand

Local government customer service centers handle millions of interactions annually. Funding reductions mean doing more with less, leading to strained phone lines, long hold times, and frustrated citizens.

CouncilContact tackles this by placing an intelligent, accessible layer directly on your public-facing website. Rather than immediately joining a phone queue, citizens are prompted to ask their question via chat.

Operational Fact

Up to 40% of inbound calls to councils involve simple fact retrieval regarding Waste Services, Housing Repair status, or Council Tax portal navigation. These can be resolved entirely by AI triage.

Intelligent triage across key service areas

Equip departments with specialized routing to handle complex requests securely.

Waste & Recycling

"When is my bin day?" or "How do I report fly-tipping?"

Our Hybrid AI reads your schedules directly. It interprets post codes and delivers answers in seconds. Complex issues (e.g. missed commercial collections) securely pop into the live Environmental team queue.

Housing & Tenancy

Check criteria limits and repair timelines.

Act as a secure buffer. Pre-chat forms capture tenant IDs and drop users into the Housing queue. Officers review the context before replying, reducing handle time.

Revenues & Benefits

Handle sensitive Council Tax or relief queries.

Citizens speak with benefits officers securely. Officers can see exactly which page the citizen is stuck on (e.g., 'Apply for Single Person Discount') to offer precise co-browsing assistance.

Elections & Registration

Manage cyclical surges in traffic instantly.

Update the AI knowledge base temporarily during election season. Automatically answer questions regarding polling locations, Voter ID requirements, and deadlines without human intervention.

60% Deflection of routine inbound calls achievable via triage.
<5s Average instant response time for citizens via AI.
100% Data Sovereign architecture hosted exclusively in the UK.

Accessibility & Inclusion Guarantee

Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 require your digital services to be usable by everyone. Third-party widgets often break compliance. CouncilContact is built to pass WCAG 2.2 AA audits out of the box.

Keyboard Navigable

Fully operational via keyboard tabs. No keyboard "traps" exist, and visual focus states are prominent and contrasting, natively passing GDS design checks.

Screen Reader Ready

Strict ARIA labelling implementation. When a new message arrives, live-regions announce it audibly to visually impaired users.

Cognitive & Language

Contrast ratios exceed 4.5:1. Users can zoom up to 200%. Includes real-time, bi-directional auto-translation for ESL citizens avoiding linguistic isolation.

Information Governance

When deploying SaaS in local government, verifying where data lives is paramount.

  • UK Infrastructure: All chat transcripts, embeddings, routing, and processing remain rigidly within UK borders.
  • GDPR & DPIA documentation: We provide full DPIA assisting collateral to clear security checks fast.
  • Automated Data Purging: Set strict retention limits (e.g. 30 days) to mitigate Freedom of Information (FOI) burdens overhead.
  • Role-Based Access: Environmental officers cannot read Housing conversations. Strict RBAC protects citizen privacy inherently.

CMS Agnostic Integration

CouncilContact embeds effortlessly via a single synchronous tag into standard public sector infrastructure:

  • Jadu (Continuum)
  • GOSS Interactive
  • Granicus (Firmstep)
  • Placecube
  • Standard WordPress

Common operational questions

How does the AI avoid hallucinating incorrect policies?
We utilise bounded Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The AI agent cannot search the open internet. It only processes the specific council PDFs, policy manuals, and web pages you provide to its memory bank. If an exact answer isn't in your official documentation, it immediately hands off to a human operator.
What are the licensing and procurement costs?
Licensing is handled transparently via our parent platform, IMSupporting. Packages start at £49.99/mo for solo testing. Metropolitan boroughs and large service desks typically utilise our comprehensive Business deployment at £1,499/mo depending on concurrency limits. Consult IMSupporting pricing.
Can we sandbox the widget before full deployment?
Absolutely. Use the form above to provision a workspace instantly. You can embed the provided javascript tag on an internal staging server or intranet to demonstrate WCAG compliance and routing logic to your security team before ever putting it on your public '.gov.uk' production servers.