United StatesPublic sector2023 – ongoingSullivan County, New York
Dialogflow virtual agent for county website questions
Sullivan County's DMV saw call volume fall by more than 56% after a virtual agent began answering web questions
Problem
County offices got hundreds of calls and emails a day about the same basic questions, such as opening hours and where to pay taxes. The county serves more than 78,000 residents with limited staff and budget. It could not afford to expand its team or build a call center.
Approach
The county built a virtual agent on Google Cloud's Dialogflow, with the partner SpringML, and launched it in just under three months. It sits on the county website and answers common questions with a list of topics or typed text. The county plans to add Dialogflow assistants to every department.
Results
Takeaway
The county used a chatbot for simple, repeated questions and left complex cases to staff. The DMV, which gets many such questions, reported the largest drop in calls.
Categories
- Industry
- Public sector
- Business function
- Customer service
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- Conversational and voice AI
- Adoption
- Partner co-development
- Evidence
- Vendor case study
Sources
Source summaries
Google Cloud's customer story describes how Sullivan County, New York, built a Dialogflow virtual agent with SpringML to answer common website questions. It quotes the county's communications director on a drop of more than 56% in DMV call volume over four months against the year before. It also says support moved from 8 hours to 24 hours a day. The page carries no date; the Internet Archive first saved it on June 12, 2023.
Full details are in the original sources.