‘Reducing friction’: How AI is helping Westminster City Council offer a better service to residents
Westminster City Council is using AI to give residents more accurate and relevant answers to queries faster. This is freeing up time for staff to spend on more complex cases that require more support.
Westminster City Council has one of the busiest front doors in local government. Home to iconic buildings such as the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, the Borough has more than 200,000 residents, tens of thousands of businesses, and welcomes 52 million visitors a year.
That leads to a constant stream of questions, problems and requests – around 500,000 a year in fact, most of them by phone.
“I think that the AI really helps our teams show up and be their best selves“
For Nadia Ali Head of Customer Service, the Council’s contact centre is where local government meets the public. It is where a resident tries to make sense of a confusing process; where someone asks for help at a difficult moment; and where small points of friction can turn into stress.
“Delivering projects like this is not about technology,” she says. “It’s about reducing the friction that residents experience. It’s about improving their lives.”
Ali calls Westminster “an absolutely extraordinary city”, but there are sharp inequalities behind the famous landmarks, “real health inequality” amid the prosperity, and deprivation in housing and education.
Fixing the loop
What angers people most when contacting the call centre?
“It’s having to repeat yourself,” she says without hesitation, particularly when the Authority already holds the basic information. “My goodness, you pay Council Tax. They should absolutely be able to find your address on the system.”
The frustration grows when information fails to travel.
“If you’re requesting a service, for example, if you need some work done on your house. And the person turns up and actually doesn’t understand what they’re there to do,” Ali says, “the whole context of the conversation hasn’t actually reached the person who’s meant to fix your problem.”
To tackle these friction points, the Council started with detailed discovery work in mid-2025, listening to residents, reviewing more than 3,000 call recordings, and mapping what happened to customer enquiries. Ali says it revealed data was “all over the place”, with channels that did not tell a single story. The goal became simple: help residents get the right answer first time and help staff pick up the thread from consistent records.
“It’s great to see a very busy Council like Westminster using Microsoft’s AI-powered technologies to remove friction points for residents and offer them a better service“
Ali does not see this as a battle between channels. “We don’t want to be digital by default or digital by choice,” she says. “It’s really about the right channel for the right conversation.”
They built chatbots in Microsoft Copilot Studio to handle initial inquiries, then implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Centre platform to knit together the data gathered from enquirers’ calls, their website activity, and case notes so handovers felt seamless.
Now, when someone rings up the Council or raises a query on the website, a chatbot records all the details and context of the conversation and passes it on to the human agent. “So customers don’t have to repeat themselves,” Ali explains.
“I think that the AI really helps our teams show up and be their best selves,” she says.
Tools like real-time transcription and AI-generated summaries reduce the burden of note-taking while trying to listen properly. One colleague told Ali that this enables her to “focus on the person rather than the keyboard”.
This consistency also improves what happens after the call.
“We used to misrepresent the customer quite often,” Ali says. “Things would get lost in translation.”
Clearer summaries and more accurate records help a case travel through the organisation without losing nuance and accuracy.
Small savings, big impact
Implementing the chatbot and Dynamics 365 Contact Centre has enabled Westminster to reduce “wrap-up time” – the minutes spent finishing notes after a call – from three minutes to two.
“That’s 500,000 minutes saved a year,” she says – about 8,300 hours, or more than 220 working weeks.
That extra capacity enables better service. For example, Ali highlights the Council’s customer advocacy team, which supports vulnerable residents needing housing repairs, for example. With this extra time, the team can help residents navigate the system and keep them up-to-date with progress. It’s this proactive “hand-holding” that’s most valuable, she says.
Right first time
Before the new approach, Westminster’s chatbot handled around 300 queries a month. Since launching the new system in September 2025, Ali says it has handled 33,400 queries, resolving 89.5% of them without the need for referral to human agents.
“I can have my query answered any time of the day,” Ali says, “and I don’t need to understand Council structures and systems and which department to phone.”
And better visibility and interpretation of the contact data is delivering valuable insights, she adds. One person was contacting the Council hundreds of times a week, “…and they didn’t even live in Westminster!” she says, something staff knew anecdotally but which the data proved.
Safeguards and best practice
But she is clear that automation needs safeguards.
Westminster has put controls in place – against “jailbreak phrases”, for example, that aim to make chatbots say or do things they aren’t supposed to. The chatbot has also been trained to give deliberately neutral responses in sensitive situations where tone and safeguarding are critical.
Her advice to other organisations wanted to improve their customer service?
“Don’t rush the discovery phase,” she says, “and don’t buy technology for technology’s sake.”
Westminster is also training staff on tools like Copilot and Copilot Studio to build capabilities that could turn contact centre talent into “the AI engineers and the software developers of the future.”
Amanda Sleight, General Manager of Sales, Microsoft UK, says: “It’s great to see a very busy Council like Westminster using Microsoft’s AI-powered technologies to remove friction points for residents and offer them a better service.
“The time saved on routine tasks is freeing up staff to help vulnerable people more effectively and successfully address more complex cases.”