ELLIS - your intelligent chatbot

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is designed to simulate human conversation, answering your questions with pre-calculated responses.

Why has this been introduced?

We've introduced ELLIS to help our customers find the answers they need, quickly and easily. We are encouraging our customers who are willing, to use ELLIS in the first instance.

ELLIS is available 24/7 and can provide access to some of our services outside of our usual office hours. It is convenient to use, and also helps to free up the phone lines so that the team can deal with vulnerable customers, customers who are unable to contact us digitally, and also those with complex queries. ELLIS is also able to direct you to other organisations quickly and efficiently if your question is not related to support or advice that the councils can assist with.

How do I ask ELLIS a question?

If you are using our website, select the image of ELLIS from any page and choose one of our more commonly visited services or type your question into the text box. Then submit your question, either pressing return to enter or by selecting the arrow symbol to submit it. The chatbot will then respond with its answer.  If you are calling us, ELLIS can currently be found under Option 8 on our voice response. 

The chatbot responds best if your question is phrased clearly in four or more words, but not too long. If you do not receive the answer you are looking for at first, try re-phrasing the question.

As we are early in our journey with ELLIS, your feedback is important to us. There is an option within ELLIS to submit feedback via the rating option on how well the chatbot has handled your answer. If at first you don't receive the answer that you expect and have tried re-phrasing the question, please provide feedback via ELLIS, so that ELLIS can continually improve.

If the question is complex, and/or may require human intervention or is on a topic that ELLIS is not familiar with, ELLIS is able to route the chat to one of our Customer Advisors on your request. 

To speak with an advisor simply ask ELLIS 'can I speak to someone'.

Please note our advisors will only be able to assist within office hours.

• More information on other ways to contact us

What questions can I ask?

You can ask ELLIS on the website, questions relating to the following subjects:

• waste and recycling
• Council Tax
• benefits
• housing
• planning
• environmental issues

ELLIS on the phone, can currently answer questions related to:

• libraries
• weddings
• funerals
• births
• parking 

More topics are being added to ELLIS in the future.