The municipality is the primary point for citizens to come into contact with the government. That is why VNG Realisatie is working with municipalities and partners on the development of a government-wide chatbot that should be placed on the websites of municipalities. The ultimate goal: a chatbot that, as a virtual assistant, shows citizens the way within the government. Ziptone spoke with key players on the development team.

 

Published a year and a half ago VNG Realization together with, among others, the Association of Public Affairs Directors (VDP), the Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG), process specialists and HowAboutYou, a video the front office of the future (2020). What will the government's public service provision look like in the future? Spoiler: accessible, interactive, digital, mobile are keywords. Chatbot technology is also being considered in municipalities.

'Gem' is the name of a personal assistant, who supports citizens across municipalities – regardless of the municipal website you are on. Gem is currently being developed by a VNG realization team that includes employees from the municipalities of Tilburg and Utrecht.

Jesse Leemput (Advisor/Program Manager Services, Municipality of Tilburg): “This chatbot is developed from the idea of ​​generic services. We focus on the 20 percent of products that take 80 percent of the time. When services become more specific, we do not catch them with this chatbot. It is therefore a basic facility with which we can take the customer journey to a higher level.”

Harmonization of municipal services and products

Part of the vision of the future of municipal services is that the 355 municipalities must work towards generic products and services. At the moment there are still differences between the working methods of the municipalities, even when it comes to generic services such as a passport or driving licence. According to the team developing the government-wide chatbot, chatbot technology offers an opportunity to harmonize services and products.

Although a passport, a move and a driver's license are 'generic' products, there are considerable differences in how municipalities deal with these products. These differences are not only in processing time and costs, but also in the required documents that citizens must provide and in what is and what is not included.

Harvey van der Meer (product owner chatbot team, municipality of Tilburg): “We cannot enforce from the chatbot that there should be no differences in the relocation process between, for example, Den Bosch and Eindhoven.”

“Enforcing blueprint is difficult”

Project leader Joost Groenestein (VNG Realisatie) adds: “Enforcing a blueprint is difficult for municipalities. Content can be a driver to standardize processes. I wouldn't immediately call it a variation on 'Government has Answer©' (a government-wide blueprint from the 90s, ed.), but that is what you would like to work towards. After all, we are all the same as municipalities, so let's behave in the same way. We are there for the residents and not for ourselves.”

In any case, the team wants to ensure that the chatbot can classify the citizen's question and then advise on the product or service. The handling of the more detailed answer to the question is up to the municipality, which must itself ensure that the bot can ask additional questions in the future.

Gain experience with new technology

The initiators also want to gain insight into questions about how to organize and manage your content for a chatbot. Which competencies do you need? “If we were to leave the development to an external party, as an organization you would be deprived of this new knowledge, even if it is technology that can only be deployed on a large scale in a while,” explains Peter Paul Hellings. He is involved in the chatbot project as Project Leader Services from the municipality of Utrecht.

When developing the chatbot, the developers from Genius Voice and Maykin Media draw on call scripts, live chat sessions and webcare sessions. The development team has been supplemented with content editors from Utrecht and Tilburg. The chatbot is trained with different variants of different questions, all together it involves thousands of training sentences, says Suzanne van der Velden (scrum master, Tilburg municipality). The first pilot will take place in the municipality of Dongen. The resulting feedback serves to further train the bot. Furthermore, HowAboutYou has been selected as a partner for the realization of the escalation model: how can a chatbot conversation in pilot location Dongen be transferred to a live employee?

[text continues below image]

Open source

The initiators prefer to work with Open Source technology and not be dependent on suppliers. The team adheres to the principles of Common Ground, a set of principles aimed at cooperation between municipalities in the renewal of the government's information provision. The purpose of Common Ground is to facilitate data exchange between municipalities through a different, standardized information architecture.

Van der Meer: “Common Ground is based on principles such as one-off development and multiple use. Common Ground must provide standards so that you can also use other applications. Suppose a nice application for a municipal counter has been developed in Zwolle, then other municipalities should be able to simply adopt it. The chatbot is set up according to these principles.”

Attracting municipalities to participate

According to Groenestein, it cannot be ruled out that municipalities are or will be working independently on their own chatbot projects. “Our message is: don't do it on your own, it's expensive technology and management also costs time and money. We want to entice municipalities to join us.”

The pilot in the municipality of Dongen will run until the summer. After that, the team will scale up: with multiple products, and more organizations to join. The chatbot goes more into the depth of transactions. In addition, a management organization must be set up. Leemput: “In the second half of the year, we want to join other municipalities that are already thinking along with us. By the end of 2020, we want to have at least ten municipalities involved in the next pilot. If more municipalities want to join, we would like to hear from you.”

Local translation is custom work

After the pilot in Dongen, one of the first steps will be to make a widget available that municipalities can use to place the chatbot on their web page. Gem can then answer a question such as 'what does a passport cost in Amsterdam' and refer to deep links.

Groenestein: “We cannot make a bot based on local information for all 355 municipalities. In all likelihood, this generic bot will start talking to local bots with specific skills. Gem can then route a notification about the outdoor area to a system for notifications about the outdoor area, where a municipality can automate the follow-up part itself.” (zip tone)

Check out Ziptone's Chatbot Dossier

Featured, Technology