Renfrewshire Council

Our Digital Advisor, Millie will be available 24/7 to answer any routine customer enquiries.

Most people contact us to ask similar questions or requests about a small number of services. Many calls often have a straightforward answer or can be resolved with simple advice.

When these are automated with Millie, it means our customer service advisors can prioritise higher value work, and we can help more people, more quickly. It will make us more efficient and effective for our residents. 

How does Millie work

Millie is trained using a custom-built organisational language model designed specifically for the public sector and covers over 1,000 council-related topics.

When a customer calls our customer contact centre, Millie will try to help them, at the same time as helping lots of other people.

Previously, our phone system used a recorded message that gave callers a list of numbered options. They had to select the option for the team they thought might be able to help. Millie will ask relevant questions to understand what they are looking for and will find the most appropriate answer, then offer to text the answer as well as relevant information from our website and any helpful links.

If Millie can't answer, or thinks they need immediate support, she will transfer their call to the right service, and an advisor will speak with them as soon as possible.

This is an additional service that complements the other ways residents can contact us, inc. MyAccount and face-to-face appointments, and is the culmination of months of hard work led by the customer and digital operations team and supported by teams from across the council.

Next steps

Millie is always learning and the more questions she answers, the more effective she will become. Callers will be encouraged to give us their feedback, and this will be used to ensure we continue to improve Millie's performance and our customer service.

In the longer term, we still expect most of our calls to be answered by a customer service advisor and the use of Millie will free up the team to deal with more complex cases and provide our customers with the personalised support they need. ​

We will also look to expand the use of Millie to the Council website when we launch our new website in 2025/26. 

Published Thursday 14 November 2024