Glasgow Life is one of Scotland’s largest charities, delivering culture, sport, and other services on behalf of Glasgow City Council, including libraries, community centres, and Glasgow Club.
With its previous chatbot system requiring constant manual updates, Glasgow Life needed a smarter, more scalable way to support customers online.
Working with Talkative and our channel partner Commsworld, the team launched a new AI Agent in just four weeks.
The results so far speak for themselves:
- 97% of AI conversations handled without human involvement
- 53% of AI interactions taking place outside standard weekday service hours
- 90%+ answer rate achieved within the first week
- 70% positive customer feedback
- 28% growth in monthly AI conversation volumes between April and July
Here’s how they did it.
The challenge: Moving beyond a manually maintained chatbot
Before Talkative, Glasgow Life was already using a chatbot to support customers online.
The problem was the amount of manual work required to keep their previous system useful.
Information across Glasgow Life’s services changes regularly. Sports centre opening hours, club timetables, facility information, and other customer-facing details all needed to be manually updated in the chatbot whenever the website changed.
This meant the team had to maintain multiple sources of information, creating extra work and increasing the risk of customers receiving outdated answers.
Glasgow Life wanted to turn its website into a single source of truth instead.
Rather than continually programming and updating individual chatbot responses, the organisation needed an AI-powered solution that could automatically use up-to-date information from its website to answer customer questions.
And there was another challenge: time.
Glasgow Life needed to migrate away from its previous chatbot platform quickly, putting the team under pressure to implement, test, and launch a replacement within a matter of weeks.
The solution: An AI Agent powered by Glasgow Life’s existing knowledge
Working closely with Glasgow Life and Commsworld, Talkative helped the team implement a Digital AI Agent capable of supporting customers across Glasgow Life’s wide range of services.
Instead of relying on manually maintained chatbot content, the AI Agent uses Glasgow Life’s website as its primary knowledge base source.
This means information can be maintained in one place, while the AI automatically draws on that content to provide relevant answers to customer questions.
The solution was designed to support enquiries spanning Glasgow Life’s diverse service offering, including sport and fitness, museums, libraries, and community facilities, directly through web chat.
With a tight deadline to work towards, Glasgow Life dedicated significant resources to implementation and testing, while the Talkative team provided hands-on support throughout the process.
The result?
Glasgow Life went live with its new AI Agent in just four weeks. And the difference in performance was apparent almost immediately.
Glasgow Life’s previous chatbot had required around one year of training to achieve an 80% answer rate.
Talkative’s AI Agent surpassed a 90% answer rate for them within its first week.
The results: Thousands of conversations with minimal human intervention
Since launching, Glasgow Life’s AI Agent has handled thousands of customer interactions.
Crucially, 97% of these conversations were handled without any human involvement, with just 2.6% requiring escalation to live or email support.
Only 1.4% of conversations resulted in an email handoff, while 1.2% were picked up by a live agent.
And these results have been maintained even as adoption has increased.
Between April and July 2026, monthly AI conversation volumes grew by 28%, while the email escalation rate remained below 2%.
For Glasgow Club specifically, conversation volume increased by an impressive 43% over the same period.
The data demonstrates how AI is allowing Glasgow Life to scale online support without creating an equivalent increase in workload for its teams.
Providing customer support beyond working hours
One of the clearest benefits of Glasgow Life’s AI Agent is its ability to provide support whenever customers need it.
More than half (53%) of all AI conversations took place outside standard Monday-Friday service hours.
That includes:
- 20% of conversations at weekends
- 22% between 8pm and 8am
- A significant second daily usage peak between 5pm and 9pm
This is particularly valuable for services like gyms, swimming pools, museums, and community facilities, where customers are often looking for information outside traditional office hours.
Instead of waiting for the customer service team to be available, users can get immediate, accurate assistance around the clock.
A fast, accessible customer experience
The AI Agent isn’t just reducing the need for human intervention; it’s giving customers answers quickly too.
For conversations where an accurate duration could be measured, the median interaction lasted just 1 minute 47 seconds.
Customer feedback has also been encouraging, with 70% of thumbs-up/down feedback being positive.
Feedback comments left by customers include:
- “Incredibly helpful answers, despite my limited question context - thank you!!”
- “Satisfied with clear and easy to understand responses.”
- “Excellent. Most helpful.”
- “First class”
This proves that it's possible to implement AI without sacrificing CSAT or CX.
Using AI insights to keep improving
For Glasgow Life, launching a new AI Agent isn’t the end of the journey.
Alongside automating customer conversations, the team has been using Talkative’s reporting and AI insights to understand what customers ask most often and identify where information may be missing.
This creates a continuous feedback loop: customer conversations reveal opportunities to improve online information and the knowledge base, in turn making the AI Agent even more useful.
Fast implementation, lasting results
In just four weeks, Glasgow Life moved from a manually maintained chatbot to a scalable AI-powered customer service experience.
And with conversation volumes continuing to grow while human intervention remains low, AI is helping the organisation provide fast, accessible online support to customers across Glasgow - whenever they need it.
Glasgow Life’s success shows that you don’t need months of implementation to see the benefits of AI.
Want to achieve similar results?
Get in touch with the Talkative team today to explore what AI customer service could look like for your organisation.
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