Working with AI specialist Futr, Loreburn Housing has launched a chatbot designed to answer a range of tenants’ questions, freeing the organisation’s small customer-service team to spend time on more complex challenges.
Sue Irving, director of housing services, Loreburn Housing, said, “Our focus is on delivering the best service to our tenants, but we don’t have a huge budget to employ a large customer service team so we needed to find a way that could support both our tenants and our staff.”
Working with Futr, Loreburn has developed a chatbot that sensitively and inclusively handles responses to a wide range of questions, supplementing its customer support team without causing any job losses. The chatbot sits on Loreburn Housing’s website and answers incoming queries almost instantly, escalating the more complex enquiries to the housing provider’s frontline team.
Irving said, “ Futr’s chatbot was quick and easy to set up, but most importantly the content is completely customisable and adaptable to our needs. We’ve been able to add a large number of questions and answers covering a significant proportion of tenants’ common queries, and a range of more general questions to help other users of the website.
“The early response from tenants has been extremely encouraging. While we always want to provide a human voice when needed, many of our tenants just want to find the answer to their question as quickly as possible, and so they’re happy to use the chatbot.”
