Before
Camden Council is a UK authority in London serving around 280,000 residents. The area is vibrant and multicultural, with many residents not speaking English as their first language.
Like most councils in the UK, Camden’s website deals with huge volumes of daily inbound requests. In Camden’s case, they needed help dealing with queries regarding local council housing.
Couple this issue with the borough’s multicultural demographic, and Camden faced a challenge well-known by many local authorities: they needed to provide accessible, real-time customer care in several languages, all while trying to reduce strain on their call center.
Getting Talkative
To help Camden Council better serve its customers, Talkative provided a range of channels and features that drastically improved the council’s ability to engage and support - regardless of their customers’ native language or accessibility needs.
To enable this universally inclusive experience, Camden switched from relying on voice calls alone to introducing Talkative’s enhanced live chat. With WCAG2.1 support for chat widget accessibility and automatic translation into over 100 languages, Camden could instantly engage with every single one of its customers in real time.
What’s more, the council also integrated into SMS and WhatsApp via Talkative’s social media messaging function. It means that customers can use the channels and languages they feel most comfortable using. From there, advisors can answer instantly translate web and social chat interactions from one centralised dashboard - all thanks to Talkative’s seamless Mitel integration.
Alongside these channels, the council also adopted cobrowse and video chat to enable live chat escalation for the customers who need it most. So, for any customers who were struggling with their digital navigation, an advisor could instantly assist with features such as screen share, annotation, scrolling, and more.
Meanwhile, Talkative’s video chat helps the council remotely assess issues within their resident’s homes. Not only does this help speed up communication between the council and its customers, it also prevents expensive and unnecessary call-outs.
After
Since deploying Talkative, Camden Council’s Juliana Beshiri had this to say:
‘“Talkative has enabled a more transparent, user-friendly interaction between users via Video chat, Web Chat, SMS, and now WhatsApp, where previously the only form of interaction was telephony.
In this way, we have been able to prioritise the emergency requests and vulnerable residents over the telephony service. By introducing these new channels we have halved the telephony demand systematically for over a year.
Talkative enables communication in over 100 languages, this has been key for residents whose English is not their first language.
Analytics, customer feedback, and live monitoring of interactions are additional welcomed features. This has been a winner all around to propel our digital channel shift from non-existent to 41% and growing over the last year.”
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