How live chat can be used by UK Police Forces

At Derbyshire Constabulary our journey with live chat started long before Orlo but when it became clear that there was an appetite internally for us to really focus on providing live chat as a reliable, mainstream reporting channel, we knew that we needed the tech in place to support us as we continued on this journey.

Day to day, the responsibility for our live chat sits with our fantastic contact handlers, and having worked closely with the team at Orlo to roll out our social media management platform capabilities within the Communications and Engagement team, we looked to Orlo to also support the overhaul of our live chat offering.

It was important to us to be able to have everything streamlined and in one place. We needed to make things easier for our contact handlers when dealing with significant volumes of inbound enquiries, which inevitably fluctuates and have the potential for a significant increase in the event of a major incident.

Having live chat available as a communication channel for our community has allowed us to alleviate demand from the often-stretched 101 phone service. It enables us to answer simple signposting queries, allowing us to provide support efficiently, and most importantly makes our service more accessible. Its real value is demonstrated when it allows people who may be vulnerable themselves or be in a vulnerable situation, an alternative method of contacting us. In some cases, such as domestic abuse, we find our live chat being used to report incidents because the perpetrator is with them and unwilling to leave meaning that the only means of contacting us for help is through live chat.

For us, digital contact channels provide an inclusive avenue for contacting the police. Whether a user needs an alternative method to contact us due to disability, illness or domestic abuse situations. Quite often, we need to consider members of our community who have hidden disabilities, such as autism and dyslexia, as well as any potential language barriers. Many of us take for granted the ability to contact the police by picking up the phone, but for some of our community that isn’t an option and live chat opens up a whole new channel of communication for those people.

When we first began conversations with our Customer Success Manager (CSM) Sophie, we were by no means an easy customer. We knew what we needed from live chat for it to work for our community and us as a police force. We worked alongside the team at Orlo to deliver a series of new functionalities which opens the feature up to other forces in the UK to adopt easily without having to go through the developments themselves.

There were multiple key developments that were crucial to the rollout within Derbyshire Constabulary – the first being that we needed live chat notifications to be big, bold and loud to make sure that live chat is heard amongst the enormous volume of digital contact our contact handlers work with. And I can honestly say, that Orlo’s Development team have delivered as they border on being annoying! Joking aside – this functionality is vital to ensure we are acknowledging and responding to incoming messages quickly. The function also allows different levels of notifications so the contact handlers can personalise it for their way of working.

Another development, and probably the most beneficial one we worked on with Orlo has been the translation service. This has been a massively positive change for our contact handlers. The efficiency of having new live chat messages come through, already translated into English, and then replies from our contact handlers automatically translated back into the person’s chosen language at the other end is allowing us to help so many more people who can’t easily pick up the phone and chat with us.

One of the things that set Orlo’s live chat offering apart for us, is the customisable elements of the tool and the ability to make adaptations to our live chat tool, from within the Orlo platform, in real time. These customisable elements can be anything from the style of the chat widget on our website, to the hours live chat is turned on and available, right through to the prepopulated questions we ask of the public when they first begin a chat with us.

In my experience, this level of control and customisation is not the case for the majority of other live chat providers. We are already seeing the time and efficiency savings of not having to log tickets with third parties, and with our suppliers to get these things changed within the tool.

Our experience of getting the live chat functionality up and running is a testament to the Customer Service and Development Teams at Orlo alongside our fantastic CSM, Sophie. As the first to go through this process, I feel like we’ve been through that pain barrier and can now pass on lessons learned to others looking to do the same.

Our transition with Single Online Home was pretty seamless, with the Orlo Team talking directly to them to overcome any issues. Internally, with our Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) we did face some challenges which took some time to work through but we now have a solid DPIA that we can share with other forces if any are thinking of making the transition.

As with any new process or piece of tech, having the time and resources needed to train up colleagues to use the new tool is always tricky. Myself and my colleague Abby underwent some intensive training with our CSM and then armed with that knowledge, we trained our contact handlers. As it transpired, training was delivered in small groups, and on occasion a more one-on-one basis, which I believe proved really beneficial in the end. It meant that we could answer our contact handlers’ specific questions directly and have a more tailored approach to the training.

One of the major advantages of moving across to Orlo’s live chat has been the level of in-depth analytics the platform provides us with, allowing us to drill down into our live chat data. We have a lot of different reports that we utilise on Orlo but the most important one for us has been the report highlighting demand levels, giving us the ability to pinpoint our busiest days and hours. This is a key tool for us in gauging our resourcing and ensuring key times are covered.

We also utilise the data from Orlo to help us get a clearer picture of who in our team of contact handlers may need a little more support or training based on how many chats they are getting through as well as response and resolution times.

From a communications and engagement perspective, we have set up many of the reports to be run and sent out to key stakeholders across the force automatically on a weekly basis, based on the information that they need for their areas of expertise.

As a force, we’re embarking on a huge programme of projects all relating to our Public Contact Improvement Programme which is looking at every touch point and avenue a member of the public can contact us on, and the implementation of live chat has been a significant focus within that.

Looking to the future, we want to continue to drive efficiencies and work with the Orlo Team to create a strong tool for policing that can serve our communities as efficiently and effectively as possible.

We all know that internal buy-in for many – largely public – organisations can be hard to get, especially with the budget restrictions many of us face. It’s also a fact that for all public organisation communications teams, the public and communities are genuinely at the heart of every decision we make. Taking the leap to Orlo live chat was a daunting process, but one that I’m glad we undertook. We have already seen the benefits and continue to do so. I’ve already spoken to several other forces who have contacted me to find out more about the live chat function Orlo offers, and the process we undertook, and as is always the case, my door (or inbox) is always open for any others who are looking for insight. So don’t hesitate to get in touch with me if you have any questions about the process we undertook here at Derbyshire. And, if you have questions for Orlo, Sophie’s always an incredible help.