The City of Williamsburg is the uppermost point of Virginia’s Historic Triangle. Home to the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation–the world’s largest outdoor living history museum, the city has a population of 15,000, almost half of which are students. While the City of Williamsburg had a multitude of ways to provide information via its website, phone, etc., they turned to Citibot as their user-friendly solution for residents and visitors to quickly and easily engage with the city via mobile.

Seeking an easy solution to complement their existing communications and reporting channels and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform to provide important information while reducing staff workload, the City of Williamsburg selected Citibot to provide an integrated text-based system to discover and address issues. With Citibot, they’ve been able to provide more options for pushing out information and a way for people to report issues regarding common city services (trash pickup, potholes, street light outages and more) and search for information.

Williamsburg can now provide multi-faceted customer service, report information and answer questions in real time, without taking up staff time. Citibot also established a platform for the city to leverage AI, which was a priority of the city’s. Citibot introduced a way for the city to quickly become informed about issues and fix them, along with providing citizens with instant access to questions they may have.

Since launching, Citibot has answered 79 percent of residents’ questions instantaneously without requiring assistance from the city’s staff.

Because Citibot products provide full resolution, any questions that are not answered automatically by the chatbot or that do not meet resident needs are then sent into the city's workflow management system for staff to further address.

Here are some of the findings from interactions Williamsburg residents have had with Citibot over the last two years:

• 38 percent of residents who texted in were looking for city or staff information

• 24 percent of requests made were related to recycling

• 10 percent of interactions were about parking issues

Now, two years later, Williamsburg reports that the usage of Citibot continues to climb, and it has been well received.

Williamsburg’s Director of Information Technology, Mark Barham, explains “Pretty much everyone has a cell phone in their hand–giving them that option to search for information whether they are in the city or not is a valuable way to do things and a valuable way for us to communicate.”

“I would absolutely recommend Citibot. I think the platform is in a place that is going to carry this type of work into the future,” he continues. “The ability to have Citibot embedded in a website, working through AI/voice recognition. For me, it’s a no-brainer.”

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