Guest blog (Content Guru): AI Drives Efficiency and Improves Citizen Services

Martin Taylor analyses how AI is set to revolutionise the public sector and the efficiencies it will deliver, especially within contact centres .

Driving efficiency sits at the heart of UK Government plans to revolutionise the public sector, and the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a vital role in helping achieve that goal.

Both the size and the operational efficiency of Britain’s public sector have come under fire recently after data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that the civil service has grown by 53,000 in the past year, taking the total number of employees to 6.14 million, the largest it has ever been. The increase in the number of public sector employees is widely seen as unsustainable, especially against the backdrop of domestic and global economic challenges. As part of the Government’s plans to improve performance and efficiency, we can expect to see AI proliferate across multiple departments, as well as in Local Government.

Successful AI implementations are already starting to make an impact in the private sector and these early examples provide a good indication of where AI can deliver the greatest benefit. One key area where AI is both improving performance and driving efficiency, as well as improving job satisfaction, for large numbers of workers is within contact centres. The public sector deals with ‘citizens’ rather than ‘customers’, but the challenge remains the same: managing a high volume of interactions effectively whilst contending with finite resources.

Businesses from a wide range of sectors, including highly regulated markets such as banking and insurance, have begun utilising AI during customer interactions. At the start of an interaction, AI captures details and intent from customers joining the queue and enables intelligent self-service, there and then. AI summarises calls and written interactions in real-time, searches knowledge bases and displays the right information to the service agent during a conversation. Post-contact forms are automatically populated during an interaction, saving time for agents later. AI-driven analytics provide in-depth insights, including automated customer satisfaction scoring, quality auditing and resource forecasting.

The British Government has accelerated its journey towards cloud adoption and is seizing the opportunity to roll out AI in a similar fashion. The AI support tool ‘Caddy’, currently being trialed by Citizens Advice, allows support agents to search for information and resolve queries as effectively and efficiently as possible. As a result, the service claims to have halved call times by allowing workers to find solutions more quickly. Overwhelmingly positive results will no doubt see Caddy rolled out across other Government departments once its trial period has ended. AI tools such as Caddy are the first step in transforming how departments communicate with the public, and highlight how technology can be used to improve experiences across the board, whilst driving cost efficiencies.

Investment in technology has always been important in to the public sector. It’s crucial the Government not only continues with in-house projects such as Caddy, but also works alongside UK-based technology vendors to secure access to cutting-edge AI technologies.

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