Bath & North East Somerset Council
Case study
B&NES explained
Bath & North East Somerset Council (B&NES) needed to modernise the way it communicated with residents. Handling more than 50,000 calls each month alongside thousands of emails, webchats, SMS, WhatsApp and social media messages, the Council was constrained by fragmented legacy systems that made it hard to deliver fast, consistent and accessible support.
The ambition was much bigger than a telephony upgrade. B&NES Council wanted a modern, resident-first contact centre platform that could support omnichannel engagement, improve operational flexibility, unlock AI capability and help deliver its core mission of improving people’s lives.
The business challenge
B&NES Council’s existing telecommunications platform was no longer fit for the needs of a modern council serving 200,000 residents. It was difficult to adapt during incidents, reporting took days, payment workflows were manual and time-consuming, and there were no integrated chat, social, web or AI capabilities.
The impact was felt by both residents and staff. Residents did not have a consistent experience across channels, while employees had to work across multiple disconnected systems. Even simple changes often required external support, limiting agility and slowing service improvement.
The Council also wanted to avoid forcing residents into a single route for support. Instead, it needed an inclusive, future-ready platform that could support phone, email, web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, social media and British Sign Language, while giving teams better visibility, reporting and workflow control.
"We didn’t want to prescribe the communication channel our residents would use."
The solution
B&NES Council engaged independent technology consultancy 4C to help evaluate the market and shape the strategy. This process showed how far cloud communications platforms had evolved beyond traditional telephony, helping the Council define a much broader customer experience transformation programme.
The procurement process was built around user experience rather than technical specifications alone. Stakeholders from across the Council, including service teams, operational staff, end users and customer service teams, were involved from the outset. In total, 25 people helped evaluate responses, with scoring focused heavily on the resident, agent, supervisor and user experience.
B&NES Council selected Zoom as its platform, with Charterhouse Group as the implementation and partner layer. The Council wanted a long-term transformation partner, not just a supplier, and felt Charterhouse brought the collaborative mindset, expertise and commitment needed to support adoption, continual improvement and future roadmap development.
"Charterhouse were genuinely interested in making a success with us rather than just providing a service."
The transformation
B&NES Council’s existing telecommunications platform was no longer fit for the needs of a modern council serving 200,000 residents. It was difficult to adapt during incidents, reporting took days, payment workflows were manual and time-consuming, and there were no integrated chat, social, web or AI capabilities.
The impact was felt by both residents and staff. Residents did not have a consistent experience across channels, while employees had to work across multiple disconnected systems. Even simple changes often required external support, limiting agility and slowing service improvement.
The Council also wanted to avoid forcing residents into a single route for support. Instead, it needed an inclusive, future-ready platform that could support phone, email, web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, social media and British Sign Language, while giving teams better visibility, reporting and workflow control.
"The Zoom platform, along with the initial guidance from Charterhouse, means we can rollout more features such as AI Web Bots quickly."
The outcome
B&NES Council is delivering against its Customer Experience Framework and BEST values through the successful rollout of its new customer engagement platform.
In under a year, the contact centre has grown from 200 to more than 450 agents as services have adopted the solution. The platform now supports webchat, SMS, social media, WhatsApp, email and voice, giving residents greater choice while improving consistency and visibility across teams.
AI tools, including sentiment analysis, call summaries, coaching prompts and an AI-powered knowledge base, help agents work more confidently, respond consistently and reduce reliance on supervisors. In Waste Services, a virtual agent resolved more than 80% of resident enquiries within weeks of launch, freeing staff to focus on more complex cases.
Managers benefit from real-time visibility of workloads, while automated actions, reporting and call summaries reduce administration. Reporting processes that once took days are now automated, delivering faster insight and simplifying payment processing through integration with the Council’s income system.