The Swiss city of Kreuzlingen now serves inquiries from its 23,000 residents even more efficiently offering services 24/7. As part of its Smart City strategy, the residents' office uses conversational AI to answer telephone calls. The virtual assistant answers standard questions and understands Swiss German dialects in addition to standard German. The tailor-made solution was implemented in collaboration with the Swiss IT service provider UMB based on the leading conversational AI platform from Spitch. The solution is scalable, cost-effective, quick to implement and does not require any additional IT resources.
The Kreuzlingen city residents' office is visited by around 300 people every week. At the same time, citizens can also contact the city office by phone or email. Since all inquiries are processed by the same team and citizens are given priority at the counter, a smart solution was needed to avoid long waiting times, delays in responding, and staff overload.
The voice bot answers citizens' inquiries directly and efficiently as the first point of contact. It covers ten different topics, including questions about opening hours, marital status and residence confirmations, passport and ID orders, among others. The voice bot’s ability to understand Swiss German ensures a high level of acceptance among citizens. The virtual assistant is not allowed to provide legally binding information. Questions that require the attention of human staff are automatically forwarded to the responsible team during opening hours. Ensuring data privacy and security is prioritized. Data is stored securely and anonymously and deleted at regular intervals.
The aim of introducing a new AI-based system was to make customer service more efficient, faster and easier to use, reduce waiting times and generally improve the quality of services. The experience with the new system has been extremely positive. This is also confirmed by Michael Stahl, the city clerk of Kreuzlingen: “Working with UMB is absolutely uncomplicated and productive. The Spitch Virtual Assistant improves our customer service, relieves the burden on our team, and brings us significantly closer to our goal of being a Smart City”.
Stephan Fehlmann, Vice President DACH at Spitch, comments: “We are pleased that we can support Kreuzlingen on its way to becoming a future-oriented smart city. This successfully implemented project once again shows the high value of conversational AI technologies for the public sector. Not only energy suppliers, road traffic authorities, migration offices, etc., but also cities and municipalities benefit enormously from the efficiency improvements that can be achieved through the use of our solutions".
Spitch and UMB offer such solutions in many languages to all municipalities and city residents’ offices with super-fast deployment requiring no additional IT resources. Benjamin Sen, Team leader AI & Data of UMB adds: “Intelligent solutions for smart cities help make communicating with municipalities really easy thanks to the latest AI technologies – no more waiting on the line and having to make multiple calls or visits. You can call +41 71 677 61 84 at any time to experience it”.
More information about this and many other projects is available via this link. You can also contact us at any time to learn more about Spitch conversational AI solutions.
