Case Study

Council Garbage Collection Chatbot

The City of Charles Sturt is a city council in Adelaide, South Australia with approximately 100,000 residents. The council provides services such as waste, recycling and e-waste pickup, grass verge mowing, road and property services and rates collection.

City of Charles Sturt have an extensive and well maintained digital communications portfolio including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and an accompanying website with deep information and payment services.

Project Background

CCS approached Duolog to assist them in automating some responses to their Facebook Messenger customers. The most frequently asked questions were very specific :

• Which bins do I put out this week, and on what day ?

• When is mowing of my grass verge due ?

This information was already made fairly accessible on the council website, and through local area marketing initiatives such as printed calendars, however for Facebook Messenger users it was

The team used a combination of Excel for formal reporting, and WhatsApp for messaging about their plans for the day. Later in the day, each team member would post a retrospective of their achievements for the day, awarding themselves a trophy 🏆 for achievement, or clock 🕗 if they need more time.

Complication

The existing process impacted productivity  :

1. Dashboard reporting using an Excel sheet meant team members needed to be in the office to update - one person at a time.

2. Performance data was manually collated from the CRM and re-typed to the dashboard spreadsheet. In a single week, across the small team, this amounted to a whole days effort.

3. While the team were rigorous about providing on-time morning and afternoon updates, the content of the updates was free-form text, not linked to personal plans. None of the tasks could be tracked for end of month/year performance reviews.

solution

Duolog were initially tasked with designing a mobile app to capture the data. However, taking a user-centred approach to mitigate the end-user impact, an innovative solution was put together which didn't require a bespoke mobile app. Instead a structure was created to retain messaging as a core enabler, while introducing a supporting flexible data-set and structured goal tracking.

1. The team was switched from WhatsApp to Slack, replacing the consumer messaging app with an Enterprise-grade messaging platform to get access to additional benefits such as chatbots, form-based data capture and automation.

2. Shared Google sheets were introduced to replace Excel - replacing a static on-premise primary data source with a shared cloud service with API access.

3. A set of bespoke Slack applications were designed and developed to :

   • pull data from Google sheets

   • present the performance data for the user in a structured form within Slack

   • push Slack messages out to the rest of the team, and

   • push personal performance information back to Google sheets for later viewing and reporting.

4. Zapier was used to automate a variety of tasks, including replacing the manual collation of live data from the API of the Prime Capital CRM to push into a Google sheet dashboard.