Live Chat for Councils That Works When the Phone Lines Are Full

No. This page is for councils choosing live chat software, and the chat on this page is IMsupporting's own sales chat, which can't help with council tax, bins, housing or any other council service. Find your local council on GOV.UK and use the contact details on its website. If someone is in immediate danger, call 999.

A council chatbot answers residents automatically, usually from the council's own content. Live chat, or webchat, connects residents to customer service officers in real time. Hybrid live chat combines the two: AI answers routine questions and collects details, and officers take anything that needs judgement, with the whole conversation in front of them. IMsupporting does all three in one widget, and AI is optional.

From the documents you upload, yes; from your live website, no, because it doesn't crawl websites. Upload PDF, Word, Excel, CSV or text files up to 5MB each, such as service pages saved as PDFs, policies and FAQs, so you choose exactly what it uses. Where your documents don't cover a question it can draw on general knowledge, so test it before go-live: administrators can test answers and see which documents they came from. If you'd rather not use generative AI, the FAQ Module gives residents council-written answers with no AI at all.

Yes. Any journey can go straight to an officer with no AI agent in the conversation: homelessness, domestic abuse, safeguarding, arrears and hardship, for example. AI reply suggestions, chat summaries and Deep Learning (which learns from chats your officers have handled) are account-wide settings, so switch them off, or run the whole account in Human Only mode, if no text from sensitive journeys should reach the AI provider.

No. The AI agent doesn't assess risk or recognise distress by itself. It hands over when a resident asks for a person, or after the same message three times or 15 AI replies, and only when officers are online. So design for it: ask about safety first, send journeys involving risk or vulnerability straight to people, keep the AI to information journeys, and keep an eye on live AI chats.

Your chat flow decides first: a choice such as 'repair in my council home' can go straight to the housing team. The AI agent hands over when a resident asks for a person and officers are online, and officers can take over any AI chat at any time. The officer sees the whole AI conversation, the answers the resident gave in the flow and any context passed from your website, and can produce an AI summary in one click when AI is on. Residents don't have to repeat themselves.

No. It takes routine, repeat questions off the phone lines and gives officers better context for the conversations that need human judgement. Keep phone and face-to-face routes too: 6% of UK adults have no internet access at home, and the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman's good-practice steps for councils include keeping other ways to make contact when services move online.

Yes. In Automatic mode, chat (and each department) opens while at least one person who covers it is Online in Team status, and closes about a minute after the last one leaves. Office hours, with up to three opening periods a day and up to 60 closed days such as bank holidays, are set once for the whole account. Out of hours, residents see your offline message, an offline form that says when messages will be read, or the AI agent answering routine questions. Keep emergency numbers in view at those times.

Partly. Create departments such as council tax, waste, housing repairs or planning, route chats to them from the flow or the page they start on, and open or close each one separately, automatically from who covers it or by hand. Office hours and closed days are set once for the whole account, so if one service keeps shorter hours, add a Time of Day step to its journey. There's one shared queue, departments label chats rather than hide them, every officer can see every chat, and there's one knowledge base per account.

Yes, if your waste system has an API that can be reached over the internet (internal network addresses are blocked). An API Form step sends the resident's postcode or address to your system and shows the answer, such as the next collection date, with no AI involved. It posts to your endpoint, so a lookup that only accepts GET requests needs a small wrapper. Missed collection reports can go to the waste team's mailbox with an Email Form step, or into your system through an API step.

No. Residents can't attach photos or files in the chat. Chat can capture what, where and when as structured text and pass it to the right team, so link to your online report forms when you need photos.

No. Chat doesn't take payments. It can explain charges and link residents to your own payment pages, and your Pre-Chat Page can remind residents not to share bank card details in the chat.

Yes, through your own integration layer. Signed webhooks send chat started, chat closed (with the transcript if you opt in), offline message and feedback events to your HTTPS endpoints, and chat flow steps can post captured details to your APIs. There are no built-in connectors to council CRM, case management or line-of-business systems: your team, or ours, links the events to them, for example with Power Automate or your integration platform.

It works on any website or CMS that lets your team add a script, such as LocalGov Drupal, Jadu, GOSS, Granicus or WordPress, which also has a plugin. If your site uses a Content Security Policy, it needs to allow *.imsupporting.com. You can also open chat from your own labelled link or button using your Direct Chat Link, which is the most accessible way to start a chat.

Chat data is stored in UK data centres. On our standard plans, when AI features are switched on, chat text is processed by our AI provider, OpenAI, outside the UK, and documents you upload to the AI knowledge base are indexed through OpenAI too; OpenAI doesn't use API data to train its models. On Enterprise, AI processing can run in the UK instead (see the next question). Emails are sent through Amazon SES in Ireland. In Human Only mode the AI agent, suggestions, summaries and Deep Learning are off, and the optional AI analysis buttons in Reports only send data if an administrator uses them. We'll give you the full sub-processor list for your DPIA.

Yes, on Enterprise. We can run the AI, including knowledge base indexing, in the UK, for example on Microsoft Azure OpenAI in the UK South region, so resident chat text stays in the UK, isn't used to train models and isn't stored by the AI provider. For the most sensitive services, an enhanced Enterprise contract can run the AI models on our own dedicated clusters in UK South, so no third-party AI provider handles chat text at all. Both options are priced by our sales team, and a pilot can be upgraded to them while you test: talk to sales.

Yes. We provide a data processing agreement, our sub-processor list and the technical detail a DPIA and an algorithmic transparency (ATRS) record ask for: what the AI does, the data it uses, the providers involved and how officers stay in control. We'll also help with your equality impact assessment, including the accessibility and Welsh language points on this page. The ICO says most uses of AI need a DPIA. ATRS records are mandatory for central government and recommended for councils, and councils including Barnet and Leeds have published records for chatbots from other suppliers.

On Enterprise, retention is fully configurable: we set how long chats, transcripts, visitor details and audit records are kept to match your council's retention schedule. On other plans, retention and deletion periods are agreed in the data processing agreement. You can also send each chat to your records or case management system with the chat.closed webhook, which can include the resident's flow answers and the public messages of the conversation (the newest 500); private notes stay in IMsupporting. Chat transcripts can be council records, so include chat in your FOI and subject access processes.

A chat widget your council pays for is part of your website under the accessibility regulations, so include it in your own testing and your accessibility statement. Inside the chat window, new messages are announced to screen readers, the message box and send button are labelled, controls are large enough to tap and reduced-motion settings are respected. For the most accessible start, open chat from your own labelled link or button rather than the floating chat button.

Your team can write Welsh versions of every journey. Language Router (which reads the browser's language) or Page Match sends residents to them, but browser settings don't always match a resident's choice, so offer a Cymraeg / English choice first as well. A Cymraeg department can open automatically when a Welsh-speaking officer is online. The widget's built-in labels and status messages, such as 'Type your message here...' and 'Queue position', are in English only, and texts such as the header and offline message hold one version for every resident, so write those bilingually and check the widget against your compliance notice. There's no automatic translation, so test the AI in Welsh before using it, or keep Welsh journeys with Welsh-speaking officers. The Welsh Language Commissioner says chatbots that work in English only, without equivalent Welsh provision, contravene the Welsh Language Standards.

Yes. The free plan gives one officer account (one chat at a time), an AI agent with 25 AI credits a month and limited document uploads, and Solo (£49.99 a month plus VAT, up to three officers and 500 AI credits a month) suits a clerk-run council; an AI-answered chat uses about one credit. Residents get answers from your uploaded documents or FAQs when the clerk is busy, and an offline form takes messages. The public sector accessibility regulations apply to town and parish councils too, so open chat from a labelled link and include it in your accessibility statement.

Yes. One account can run on several websites, with Page Match starting the right journey for each predecessor council's pages and departments for each service. Until vesting day each council is a separate data controller and every officer can see every chat, so agree data sharing between the councils first, or run separate accounts until vesting day. There's one knowledge base per account, so write answers that say which area they apply to. Signed webhooks can send chats into the new council's systems as they change.

Add a one-question pre-chat dropdown, 'Would you otherwise have phoned us?', and track it alongside demand by hour, journey completion, abandoned chats, contact categories and satisfaction in the reports. Compare call volumes for the services you move into chat. Independent evidence on AI in councils is still thin, so measure your own results rather than relying on supplier figures, including ours.

Officers can tag nuisance visitors, and administrators can ban by IP address or device, with an optional expiry. Banned visitors see a generic message, so keep emergency numbers on your own page. Flood protection limits how quickly one source can start chats or send messages, and offline messages are capped per visitor each day.

Both can be set up for Enterprise and bespoke deployments. We can add single sign-on with Microsoft Entra ID or another SAML identity provider, and restrict sign-in to your council's network, agreed as part of your contract. As standard, officers sign in with a username and password, and administrators can require an authenticator-app code for every officer account.

Start with one service, such as waste or council tax, alongside your phones. A pilot usually runs on the Business plan (£1,499 a month plus VAT, up to 20 officers and 10,000 AI credits a month), so 12 months costs £17,988 plus VAT. Council-wide deployments run on Enterprise, with bespoke pricing, dedicated UK hosting, UK-only AI processing, retention set to your schedule and an SLA. If your information governance team needs UK-only AI processing or set retention from day one, talk to sales and we can upgrade your pilot to Enterprise terms while you test, or run the pilot in Human Only mode. Solo and Business both start with a 30-day free trial. Book a demo and we'll help you scope it.