Case Study: Leeds City Council Deploys Live Chat

Leeds City Council has worked with Sabio to deploy a next-generation live chat solution.

The Challenge

As part of its Customer Access Strategy, Leeds City Council is committed to developing its online channel – building a more transactional website with self-service options for service delivery.

Providing increased channel choice is at the heart of this initiative. The Council’s contact centre team felt that a webchat channel could help in terms of optimising the Leeds City Council site, while also supporting the growing number of younger citizens starting out on their Council customer journey.

The Solution

Sabio recommended the LiveEngage live chat solution from LivePerson to enable the Council to deploy more personalised, human interactions online at a fraction of the cost of more expensive phone and email contacts.

The solution provides the Council with a powerful tool to support the continuous optimisation of the Council’s Web presence while reducing incidents of customers failing to complete online interactions.

The Results

Following its initial deployment, the Council found that 15% of online customers were taking up the live chat invitation when offered – around twice the accepted industry average of 6-9%.

Customer satisfaction levels have also been particularly impressive, with 93.8% of users rating the Leeds City Council live chat service as excellent or very good. In addition, 96.7% of people using the service also said they would be very likely or quite likely to use the service again.

“We’ve been really encouraged by the initial results from our deployment of the live chat technology,” said Barry Ibbetson, Head of the Corporate Contact Centre for Leeds City Council. “With strong customer satisfaction and willingness to use the solution again, the Council sees live chat as a valuable additional customer contact channel that is likely to become even more popular as our customer demographic evolves.”