SUCCESS STORY / KIRKLEES MBC
From Automation to AI: Building Next Generation Council Services
Kirklees Council has spent more than a decade using automation to transform service delivery. Now, it's taking the next step - modernising customer service with cloud technology and AI.
KEY OBJECTIVES & OUTCOMES
1.
85% average overall automation rate
2.
90% automation rate for Move transactions
3.
>85,000 online transactions processed annually
4.
945,826 Revenues transactions automated
Brief
Responding to financial pressures and the need to make savings while maintaining vital services, Kirklees Council began its Govtech automation journey in 2010, expanding its Benefits solution to include Revenues in 2014.
At the beginning, residents had limited opportunities to self-serve online, creating high volumes of manual processing and avoidable contact centre demand. Reducing non-statutory services was not sustainable - they needed more efficient delivery.
Growing housing numbers, rising customer expectations and continued pressure on resources mean the council continues to look for new ways to manage workload, prevent backlogs and improve the experience for residents and employees.
That ambition extends to customer service. Having used Liberty Converse for many years, Kirklees recently migrated to the latest cloud-based, AI-powered version, reflecting its wider shift towards automation and digital-first services.
About Kirklees MBC
- Services 422,500 residents
- Based in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire
- Third largest Metropolitan District in area – it covers 157 square miles or 40,860 hectares
Solution
Maximising automation across Revenues
As part of a wider digital transformation strategy, Kirklees set out to move Council Tax and Business rates online and maximise automation across Revenues. The objective was to reduce manual effort, allowing teams to focus on collection, recovery and supporting residents who need assistance.
The council implemented Govtech's webCAPTURE digital process automation service alongside web forms enabling residents to complete transactions online.
Initial concerns about customer adoption and the impact on staff roles quickly subsided. Automation now handles most routine revenues transactions and is considered business critical.
It would be a disaster if the automation was switched off. Now that we automate 85% of processes, it plays a vital role in maintaining high service levels and allows our team to focus on the complex enquiries, supporting vulnerable residents.
Lisa Webster, Project Manager, Revenues & Benefits
Automation enables Kirklees to provide consistently good service and operational efficiency – processing increasing transactions due to housing growth, without increasing staff levels.
Next level digital customer service
With automation deeply ingrained across Revenues and Benefits, the council took the same approach with digital customer service in 2026, using digital tools and AI to make interactions easier, give employees better tools and create more capacity.
Migrating to the cloud version of Liberty Converse, marked a new chapter and gave Kirklees a stronger and more adaptable foundation for its next phase.
The council aims to:
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Increase officer self-service to provide quick access to information, knowledge content and resources, reducing reliance on manual support.
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Improve contact portal match rates, increasing successful matches from the current 62% towards a target of 80%, helping reduce avoidable demand on switchboard and contact centre teams.
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Introduce AI-powered services to automate responses to simple enquiries and support more consistent customer experiences.
We're at the beginning of our journey with Liberty Converse and we chose it for the flexibility and capability it offered us to modernise our contact centre, which supports the council ambitions of delivering better services for residents. With further upgrades going live soon, we’re introducing new functionality, helping us to continually improve consistency, efficiency and overall customer experience.
Anita Chatfield-Waterhouse, Integrated Content Centre Manager
Results
>85,000
online transactions processed annually
Nearly 1 million
Revenues transactions automated in total to date
85%
average overall automation rate
90%
automation rate for Move transactions
94%
automation rate for Landlord transactions
Detailed reporting
with up to 7 levels of customer interaction insight
Council AI tools for digital customer service
Automation is now embedded across the council, helping Kirklees to keep pace with resident needs while enabling teams to focus on higher-value work. The journey is not about replacing people with technology. It’s about continually removing repetitive work, improving access to information and giving employees more time to focus where their expertise and human judgement add the most value.
Future plans include:
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Introducing AI Agent Assist
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Exploring AI-powered switchboard functionality
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Expanding digital messaging
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Embedding AI across services over the next 12 months.
All standout digital transformation success stories begin somewhere...
No matter what your starting point is, get in touch and our team will arrange an informal conversation to understand what improvements you want to make and why, explore ways digital process automation may be able to assist and, if you need it, provide help to write a business case based on achieving those goals.