Working with IBM, the London Borough of Redbridge launched its new Binbot, powered by IBM Watson technology. The chatbot can answer questions related to routine rubbish collections and empowers the public to easily report dumped garbage and other nuisances.
“With [...] Watson, we can be far more proactive and stay ahead of the data trends and as such demand.” - Emeran Saigol, Head of Change, London Borough of Redbridge
Business challenge
A leader in innovative public services, the London Borough of Redbridge wanted to simplify communication with residents regarding rubbish collection.
Transformation
The borough launched an AI-powered chatbot that could answer straightforward questions and allowed users to find out when their holiday bin collection date was scheduled.
Results
25% lower call volumes while keeping residents better informed about schedule changes
Drives efficiency in waste clearing efforts by keeping enforcement staff better informed
~95% satisfaction rate among users of the chatbot during the Christmas period
Solution components
Watson Assistant
Watson Tone Analyzer
Watson Visual Recognition
Business challenge story
A holiday rush
Boasting a number of parks and open spaces, the London Borough of Redbridge is recognized as one of the greenest regions of the Greater London area. In addition, over the past several years, the borough has developed a reputation for innovation and improving the lives of its citizens.
“We are focused on driving change in our community and getting things done for our residents,” explains Emeran Saigol, Head of Change for the London Borough of Redbridge. “So we were looking at small scale problems that we could address that would have a direct impact on our customers, and that’s when we looked at our contact center.”
Every year in the weeks following the Christmas holiday, the center would experience a spike in call volumes related to garbage collection. Given the marked increase in waste and recycling during this period, the borough was forced to increase the frequency of its collection efforts, which often changed the pickup dates for residential neighborhoods.
“They’d be calling to ask, ‘When are my bins going to be picked up?’” adds Saigol. “We wanted to take the heat out of the contact center, but the Christmas bin collection schedule was due to start in a 17-day window. We needed something in a hurry, as any solution would have no value going live five days into the christmas Holiday period.”
Transformation
That's rubbis.
Moving quickly, the borough developed an AI-based chatbot able to answer the public’s queries regarding waste collection.
“We called it ‘Binbot’ because ‘Christmas Bin Collection Date Bot’ is a mouthful,” adds Chris Patterson, Managing Director at EscalateAI. “We had to act aggressively to have it done by Christmas since it’s not very useful having a Christmas Binbot in January. From our first conversation to go live was only a two-week period.”
Built using the IBM Watson Assistant solution, Binbot allows citizens within the Redbridge region to ask questions regarding collection schedule. And thanks to IBM Watson Tone Analyzer technology, the chatbot can monitor the conversion and escalate it to a call center representative depending on the tone of the discussion as well as the confidence rating of its answers.
“Chatbots are good with straightforward questions,” explains Patterson. “But as soon as there is any emotion or difficulty – if a user is getting upset or has a really complex question – then a human agent needs to become involved.”
The Binbot quickly proved to be a success, leading the borough to examine other areas where it might use Watson™ technology to help protect the beauty of Redbridge. “Politically, clean streets are one of our administration’s big agenda items,” clarifies Saigol. “And the movement of waste collection dates generates a huge amount of contact for the council. But by ensuring residents are able to find out what their collection dates are, we can ensure that we have a clean borough and happy residents.”
“After all,” adds Patterson, “who wants uncollected rubbish outside their front door?”
Expanding on the Binbot solution, a new visual analysis component was added to the tool, taking advantage of the IBM Watson Visual Recognition offering. The team trained the solution with over 3,000 images of rubbish, enabling it to identify commonly dumped items. Now residents can use their cell phone to take a picture of public waste, such as a rogue mattress, loose bin bags or an abandoned vehicle, and notify the borough by uploading the image through the chatbot.
Results story
Nice and tidy
“What’s really important for us is the value and output,” clarifies Saigol. “For a local government organization to commit to new types of technology in times when budgets are extremely tight, we need to show results. Fortunately, this solution did that.”
He continues, explaining: “The contact center experienced a 25 percent reduction in calls compared to the Christmas period of the previous year. And on one day, we had about 1,600 conversations through the chatbot. That level of engagement helps us to be more efficient and can potentially save us money in the long run.”
The public also appears to be pleased with their interactions with Binbot. “We built a feedback system into the bot,” adds Patterson. “And I would say about 95 percent of the feedback was excellent. They were saying, ‘Fantastic work. Great bot!’”
Beyond the Christmas season, the rubbish visualization component helps keep streets clean and empowers the borough to be more responsive to the needs of the public.
“Before, we had reports that came in secondhand, maybe five or six days after the rubbish was dumped,” adds Saigol “But now it’s much easier for people to tell us what is going on out there. We can let our enforcement teams be intelligent in how they go about planning their day-to-day operations. With Watson, we can be far more proactive and stay ahead of the data trends and as such demand.”
About London Borough of Redbridge
With its administrative functions hosted in Redbridge Town Hall in Ilford, the London Borough of Redbridge oversees a host of public services including adult and children social care, regeneration, parking, waste collection and park management. At present, the borough encompasses a population of over 305,000 residents.
About Incede.ai
Incede.ai is the AI division of Locus Solutions, Inc. harnessing the power of Data, AI and Machine Learning
With more than half of the world’s data in natural language, Incede.ai solves business problems and creates a competitive advantage by leveraging the power of Watson AI and machine learning. As thought leaders, we collaborate with stakeholders to deploy AI solutions that deliver real value.
Roman’s Pizza
Chat your way into delicious food, satisfied employees and happy customers
Overwhelmed by high volumes of customer queries, Roman’s Pizza joined with IBM Bussiness Partner Ocular Technologies to launched Levi, a customer support chatbot. The solution, powered by IBM Watson® technology, allows consumers to more easily find the food they crave while helping customer service staff stay a little saner.
“Where it used to take an average six to eight hours to hear back from us, customers now get a response immediately.”
— Matthew Jackson, Head of Digital Media, BPD Advertising
Business challenge
The customer service team at Roman’s Pizza was struggling to keep pace with the constant stream of questions being posted to its social media platforms.
Transformation
The business deployed a lateral conversation interface to handle common requests, such as those focused on store hours or weekly specials.
Results
90% of incoming queries are answered automatically without human intervention
Responds immediately to customers, while previous replies took 6 – 8 hours on average
Frees up staff to focus on more important tasks and establish a healthy work-life balance
Solution components
● API Connect
● Cloud & Data Platform
● Watson Assistant
● Watson Tone Analyzer
Business challenge story
“It was a bit chaotic”
Pizza is delicious. Round flattened dough, rich tomato sauce, cheese and, depending on your taste, a mixture of meats and vegetables — there are few meals that are as universally appealing. And in South Africa, Roman’s Pizza tries to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for this treat, offering tasty, low-cost pizza through hundreds of restaurants spread across the country.
However, alongside this high demand for its pizzas, the business was also experiencing a high demand of support from its customers.
“We’ve got a fairly small customer support team,” explains Bonnie Cooper, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Roman’s Pizza. “So we weren’t able to keep up with questions and complaints in a timely fashion. We were getting inbound communications from customers 24x7 — long after our stores had closed — meaning some of these questions weren’t answered until the next morning, several hours later.”
These delayed responses, in turn, resulted in lower review scores on social media platforms, weakening the brand. In reaction, the customer support team began working longer hours.
“It was a bit chaotic,” recalls Matthew Jackson, Head of Digital Media at BPD Advertising, the marketing agency for Roman’s Pizza. “We were seeing all of these queries, and we didn’t have a real system in place to manage, escalate or log them. At one point, we had everyone from the management team involved. Even Bonnie was responding to Facebook questions from her home on the weekends.”
He continues, adding: “But many of these questions didn’t need to be answered by a person. We were having a lot of what we call Tier 1 queries — sort of mundane things. Where is my closest store? What are your specials? Are you open? Things that customers could typically figure out with an online search, but they preferred to ask someone.”
Aware of the recent advances in AI and chatbot technology and after viewing the technology demonstrated at the Lisbon Web Summit, Roman’s Pizza decided that it wanted to deploy a customer-facing communication platform that could resolve the majority of these requests without human intervention. Of course, the solution would also need to be sophisticated enough to know when a conversation needed to be escalated to human staff — avoiding further frustration for already upset consumers.
Transformation story
I’m Levi, your pizza ambassador
“Where it used to take an average six to eight hours to hear back from us, customers now get a response immediately.”
— Matthew Jackson, Head of Digital Media, BPD Advertising
Roman’s Pizza reached out to IBM and the businesses developed and launched a lateral conversational interface called “Levi”.
Levi now acts as one of the company’s primary touchpoints for customer service, answering the majority of Tier 1 queries and helping customers to more easily get their pizza. The solution is currently available through Roman’s Pizza’s Facebook page, the company’s primary mechanism for communicating with customers, and will soon also be available on the restaurant chain’s website.
“We designed Levi to be anamorphic — in other words, very human-like”. “It’s colloquial in terms of language. Humorous in terms of personality. Intuitive, meaning it has the ability to understand the tone and sentiment of the customer and respond in a natural manner.”
“I’ve got a love-hate relationship with technology,” adds Cooper. “I love what it can do, but it can be incredibly frustrating when it doesn’t work — I don’t have the patience to deal with poor user experiences. From the beginning, I wanted Levi to come across as a friendly customer support person, not a rigid bot.”
“We’ve even had some funny scenarios where people have thought that Levi was a real person,” Jackson adds. “In one case, we had a customer who thought that there was someone on the other end of the chat window that she could flirt with to get free pizza. Levi created a space where that customer felt very comfortable in who she was talking to — that’s when you know you’ve built a good conversational interface.”
To bring Levi to life, the solution utilizes custom-built conversational interface, powered by IBM technology under an IBM Embedded Solutions Agreement (ESA). IBM Watson Assistant serves as the heart of the solution, while IBM Watson Tone Analyzer monitors chat instances, identifying when conversations need to be escalated to human staff. “It tracks the tone,” explains Lutchman. “And when it hits a threshold — swear words, aggression — it will send an SMS message to the support team that they have someone who needs help.”
In addition, the solution uses IBM API Connect® to integrate Levi with the Facebook Messenger app as well as IBM Cloud®, where the entire Levi infrastructure is hosted.
Results story
Trust the bot
On average, the Levi platform resolves over 90% of incoming issues and queries appropriately without human intervention, which dramatically reduces the demands on human staff at Roman’s Pizza. “In the past, we’d sit there on our cell phones and our computers and sacrifice family time to try and be as efficient as we can possibly be for our customers,” adds Jackson. “Now, we can give our team a healthier work-life balance, and they can explore the more exciting avenues of their careers.”
“Roman’s Pizza’s customer service response times have also improved,” notes Jackson. “Where it used to take an average six to eight hours to hear back from us, customers now get a response immediately. And if you have an issue outside of business hours that Levi can’t handle, it will log that complaint and notify the team to deal with it first thing in the morning. It addresses consumer’s concern up front and gives an expectation on when things can be resolved.”
Roman’s Pizza is also impressed with the capabilities of the underlying Watson™ technology that powers the new lateral conversation interface. “It was the tone and sentiment analysis that impressed us,” recalls Cooper. “Tone and sentiment are difficult even for humans. The fact that Watson could identify negative sentiments accurately was a strong selling point. We also liked the different languages that Watson could communicate in. While Levi is not scripted in multiple languages at this point, we have seen it have conversations with people who spoke other languages — Afrikaans speakers, for instance — and give answers appropriately.”
“I’m a big fan of IBM Cloud,” adds Lutchman. “There are so many services available — that excites us from an application development perspective. We can pull from all of these technologies to create complex solutions, and we do so in a reliable environment.”
About Roman’s Pizza
Roman’s Pizza (external link) is a restaurant chain that is well known for its two-for-one pizza promotions. Originally founded in 1993 as Little Caesar’s, the business rebranded to the Roman’s Pizza name in 2002. It is currently headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa and maintains over 230 restaurant locations, spread throughout the country.
AboutIncede.ai
Incede.ai is the AI division of Locus Solutions, Inc. harnessing the power of Data, AI and Machine Learning
With more than half of the world’s data in natural language, Incede.ai solves business problems and create a competitive advantage by leveraging the power of Watson AI and machine learning. As thought leaders, we collaborate with stakeholders to deploy AI solutions that deliver real value.