Councillors say residents are still expressing their frustration with the new system
Council officers say a new AI-automated call system has received fewer than 10 complaints over the last year. South Cambridgeshire District Council, where many staff work for four days each week, introduced “SAM” to answer the public’s questions around 18 months ago.
It was first introduced only over the web before it was rolled out for phone calls too. Jeff Membery, head of transformation and people, told a meeting of the scrutiny and overview committee they “deliberately take a very cautious approach to our use of AI”.
He said: “We try and make sure that we get things right – moving in a slow and controlled manner is more important than rushing to try and take advantage of the very latest cutting-edge technology.” He said the AI decides whether it can answer a question and, if it can’t, it will redirect the call to the contact centre.
Cllr Yasmin Deter asked what the feedback has been. Mr Membery said the satisfaction rate is 87 per cent from asking webchat users to put “a smiley face” after their query.
He said: “The thing that’s actually remarkable is – you probably see stories in the press about large numbers of complaints in relation to chat bots, but we’ve had very few. I think over the course of a year we’ve had less than 10 complaints about SAM.”
Cllr Vivien Biggs said she’d called the council to report a dead deer after a resident of her village was “very frustrated” with speaking to the AI. She said: “It wanted to talk to me about fly-tipping – obviously a dead deer isn’t really fly-tipping.”
After saying something “along the lines of, ‘I want a person’” she was put through to the call centre, who promised the deer would be removed.
Mr Membery said he would “rather suspect” that dead deer “are probably not one of the things we’ve yet trained SAM on” but was “slightly disappointed” the AI didn’t automatically pass her on to a call handler.
Cllr Heather Williams also shared her experience with SAM and said she tried the AI webchat before she “surrendered and gave up”. She said: “I appreciate the web chat is slightly different but, as a councillor, the amount of phone calls I’ve had because people haven’t been able to get through to the council.
“I find particularly when older people whose voices may not be as strong, they tend to come through because they just feel like they’re not getting through. SAM would not have responded and answered them and nor would they have been transferred – they’ve given up, they’ve hung up.”
Mr Membery said that SAM “isn’t for everybody” but he was “really surprised” to hear that people weren’t being automatically put through to the contact centre as they “test regularly”.
He said: “If somebody does come through and speaks about their experience with SAM and say it was negative, they feed that through to our digital team – we’ve not had a lot of those being fed through.”
Cllr Williams said: “There’s a big flaw in your theory there – if I’m frustrated with something, am I going to wait to be put through or am I going to hang up the phone?”
Mr Membery said the number of hang ups is recorded but it’s “impossible to know the reason why somebody gave up”. He said: “Was it because they were frustrated with SAM, or had they suddenly remembered the answer and they didn’t need to ask the question – or somebody rang on their doorbell, we don’t know that.”
Cllr Dr Richard Williams said “to end on a positive note” he had called “and it was actually very good, it did answer my query quite quickly”.

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