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# Website Design & Communication

Why Your Chatbot is Your Secret Weapon for Optimizing Your Website Content

Unlock the hidden potential of your online resources through automation and data.

Authored by Civic Plus Logo

CivicPlus

April 4, 2022
10 min

Your local government staff does its best to keep website content as up-to-date and relevant as possible for your residents. Yet in a bustling community of thousands—or hundreds of thousands—what processes do you have in place to continually audit your website’s content to ensure it offers residents the information, news, and resources they need? The resource of time for local government staff is a precious commodity; as ideal as it would be for you to regularly survey residents to gather feedback about their experiences with your website, realistically, you need more efficient ways to gather quantitative resident search and engagement data.

CivicPlus® Chatbot1 is an automated customer service tool that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) that works within your CivicPlus website to provide an automated customer service experience that helps residents find the information they need from your website without picking up the phone or sending an email. This automation saves staff and residents time and creates more positive civic experiences in your community.

 

The Power of Automation

Automated tools exist to make problem-solving easier. That goes for the end user looking for a piece of information or the administrator adding the content or adjusting online information. The CivicPlus Chatbot provides intelligent shortcuts for staff and users, creating higher levels of satisfaction in transactional experiences and significant efficiencies for all parties involved, particularly staff who can use the tool’s reports to understand the content residents search for most often. When what’s being frequently searched for includes content that doesn’t exist on your website, you have an immediate opportunity to enhance your content and your residents’ experiences with your administration.

Chatbots and other resident self-service tools are quickly becoming a more prevalent element of residents’ experiences with their local government, especially relative to obtaining information, news, forms, and engagement opportunities. It’s essential to stay up-to-date with the advancements in digital solutions that will only become more prevalent and relied upon in the future. The rapid pace at which technology is developing is not going to slow, if anything you can expect it to continue to accelerate and for greater leaps to take place. Ensuring you’re staying current with advancements ensures you’re not left behind in a disadvantageous position regarding your content and communications.

 

Expediting the Resident Digital Self-Service Experience

Residents come to government websites each day, sometimes knowing exactly what they are looking for, but also not always knowing what department manages the information they need, or what keywords to use in a site search. The advanced technology combines the power of site search and AI to deliver the information residents need in a frictionless, personalized experience that mimics a human-to-human service interaction. Having a tool that can take in the input from a resident and run it through a vast knowledge base to interpret and assist them while also providing essential data about what can be improved on the administrative side, drives higher resident satisfaction, and creates more positive civic experiences.

 

Matching Answers to Intent

Wouldn’t it be nice to get inside the head of your residents so you could better serve them? Again, it’s not always easy for residents to describe what it is they need or what they’re looking for. Taking the pressure off them and empowering them with an AI search tool that closely mimics an interaction with a staff member allows them to describe their needs as best they can. This allows them to receive quick results in the form of options, answers, or next steps provided by a Chatbot technology that takes in a vast amount of information and never stops learning from your website and the resources you link to.

 

Smart Search Covering Multiple Sources

Chatbot crawls your CivicPlus® website and other linked databases to create a continually updated AI-powered knowledge base. With Chatbot, your residents benefit from a one-stop information search experience, no matter how you manage your data on your administrative backend.

 

A Detailed View of Your Residents’ Needs

Find what your residents are most interested in using detailed data provided by CivicPlus Chatbot. See searches broken down into categories and find out what action phrases your community members are using when coming to your online resource to address an issue or what questions are being asked most often. Take advantage of details like when users are most commonly accessing resources, which can provide you with essential data on when it’s most effective to make announcements or when it’s best to do maintenance and updates.

 

Improving Resident and Local Government Relations

CivicPlus Chatbot’s automated assistance generates quicker answers while freeing up staff to focus on important local initiatives Your local government website is one of the most essential resources for the residents of your community. Local-level government is the most trusted form of government, so ensuring that your offered resources are thorough, exhaustive, and evolving, can go a long way toward creating regular positive civic experiences for residents.

 

CivicPlus Chatbot is powered by Frase

Written by

Authored by Civic Plus Logo

CivicPlus

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