Derby Homes and Derby City Council are using two AI-powered virtual assistants from ICS.AI, ‘Ali’ and ‘Darcie’, to handle almost half of all inbound calls.
The new AI assistants, Ali covering Derby Homes and Darcie covering Derby City Homes, are answering over 1,000 questions per day, directly handling around 45 per cent of all inbound calls. Beyond answering queries, they can also direct calls to over 40 different departments.
Andy Brammall, director of digital and physical infrastructure and customer engagement, Derby City Council, said, “We started with an AI-powered website assistant, followed by supplementing our main switchboard with phone-based AI using ICS.AI’s Smart AI platform.
“Trained in over 1,000 council services, it has exceeded our deflection [of calls to human operators] target of 21 per cent, handling over 62,000 calls and achieving an incredible 43 per cent deflection. One of the reasons we chose the Smart AI platform from ICS.AI was because it offered a ‘human parity’ AI language model trained in over 1,000 housing- and council-related topics.”
