A council website contains the answer to almost every question a resident has. It also contains several thousand other pages, organised by department rather than by what people need. So residents give up and contact the council instead, and the contact centre spends its day repeating information that was already published.
The problem is findability, not content.
The teardown: the same questions, endlessly
A small number of topics account for most contact. Bins and missed collections. Parking permits and fines. Council tax bills, discounts and payment. Reporting fly-tipping, potholes, street lighting and graffiti. Planning applications. School admissions. Housing. Each is documented, and each is hard to find at 8pm.
Residents use different words
Residents ask about "the bin men", "my tax", "the pothole outside mine". Council pages use service names. That mismatch is why search fails and why an assistant that understands ordinary phrasing helps so much.
Resident: When do the bins go out on my street? Assistant: Collection days are set by address, and the bin collection page has a postcode lookup that shows your collection day and which bin goes out that week. It also explains what to do about a missed collection and the date changes over bank holidays.
Bank holidays cause spikes
Every bank holiday shifts collection days and closes services, generating a predictable surge. Publishing the changes early and answering from them automatically absorbs most of it, the pattern described in bank holiday enquiries.
Reporting problems
Reporting a pothole or fly-tipping should take a resident one path, not a search through departments. An assistant that routes residents straight to the right form, with the information it needs, raises the quality of reports as well as the volume.
Accessibility and digital exclusion
Some residents cannot use online forms easily. Any automated answering must always offer a clear route to a person, and should never be the only way to reach the council.
Urgent and safeguarding matters
Anything involving danger, a child or adult at risk, homelessness tonight or a public safety hazard must be routed immediately to the right emergency or out-of-hours service, never queued behind general enquiries.
Evening and weekend contact
Many residents work during contact centre hours. Answering at any hour is not a cost-saving measure for them, it is the difference between getting help and not. The same is true for charities, as described in donor questions that go unanswered on charity websites and volunteer enquiries that fizzle out without a reply.
Council tax and payments
Council tax generates constant contact: how to set up payments, how to tell the council about a move, which discounts and exemptions exist and what to do about arrears. Publishing these in residents' own words, with the forms linked directly, removes one of the largest volumes a contact centre handles. Anyone in financial difficulty should be pointed to the council's support process and to free independent debt advice rather than given any assessment of their situation.
Planning and licensing
Planning applications and licensing generate detailed questions from residents and businesses alike. A website can explain the process, the stages and how to comment on an application, while any judgement about a specific application stays with planning officers.
Repeated service questions elsewhere
Public-facing organisations everywhere answer the same question hundreds of times, as described in the allergy question your staff answer every service.
Getting started
Identify your ten highest-volume topics, rewrite them in residents' words and answer from them at any hour. SpideyChat for public and nonprofit organisations answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.