Customer Service Automation
The City of Helsinki needed to improve citizen service speed and flexibility, reduce pressure on overworked customer-service teams, and connect siloed service organizations without compromising privacy for sensitive public data.
Reported impact
Helsinki created a scalable digital-assistant foundation that handles significant daily citizen demand, shortens queues, supports employees, and makes it easier to add new multilingual service assistants over time.
The City of Helsinki worked with IBM Consulting to build a network of virtual assistants on IBM watsonx Assistant so citizens could reach city services faster and employees could absorb inquiry volumes. IBM Consulting and the city co-designed chatbot scope, tone, and user experience, then used IBM Garage workshops to build intent models from customer-service expertise when chat logs were unavailable. As the program expanded, assistants were connected to internal departments, other Finnish municipalities, and outside vendors, while IBM Watson Discovery was added to the internal IT assistant so unanswered questions could search a large instruction library. A multi-chatbot serving healthcare and social services also uses IBM Watson Language Translator to deliver Finnish, Swedish, and English experiences. The architecture lets Helsinki reuse training data, run sensitive workloads from a Finland data center when needed, and add new assistants without rebuilding from scratch.
Citizen or employee questions enter watsonx Assistant over web chat, APIs connect the assistant to city departments and outside systems, Watson Discovery searches instruction content when needed, and Language Translator expands multi-chatbot responses across Finnish, Swedish, and English experiences.
"Chief among the platform requirements were natural language processing and the ability to connect to other systems ... using APIs."
"Currently, the City of Helsinki is running 10 virtual assistants"
"The team began work on the digital assistant in December 2020 and launched it in early March of 2021"
"The team then built an internal IT virtual assistant for employees that incorporated IBM Watson Discovery."
"Virtual assistants currently handle up to 300 customer contacts per day"
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Scoring methodology
Customer Reference Value measures usefulness as a customer reference. Evidence Confidence measures the quality and traceability of available evidence, not independent verification.
Traceability
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