Transport for NSW Innovation - Odie Bot
The Open Data Hub Virtual Helpdesk Agent helps users find and access their data
Odie Bot
The Open Data Hub Virtual Helpdesk Agent
Transport for NSW (TfNSW) manages one of the largest fleets of vehicles in Australia, including Buses, Ferries, Light Rail, Trains and Metro.
The Open Data Hub is a website where the NSW Government provides access to transport public information to be accessible, used, modified and shared by the community, to allow innovation and new projects using Transport data to be created.
Data-Driven partnered with TfNSW to deliver “Odie” – The Open Data Bot to help the general public find the transport data they are looking for in a quicker, friendlier way, whilst reducing support costs and manual effort for the TfNSW team.
Transport for NSW Innovation Challenges
Transport for NSW’s objective was to improve the way that data consumers could find, understand and use the public transport data available published publicly on the Open Data Hub.
One of the main challenges was that the datasets are disparate, named differently and occasionally hard to find. This can make finding datasets difficult and frustrating for the data consumers, resulting in potential missed opportunities to innovate.
In addition, the API registration process has been a source of frustration for users, increasing the amount of time and effort from the support staff to answer even simple questions that the user was not able to find on the website.
❝ The Open Data Hub needed a solution to help data users navigate the Open Data Hub website and easily find, view and use transport public data. This solution just gives us that, so that we can understand how our users are searching for data and improve our services. ❞
The Solution
Odie is an interactive, conversational bot embedded in the Open Data Hub website acting as the first line of interaction between users, the business and the public available data.
Odie welcomes new users, answers frequent support queries and can understands misspelt words and phrases using Natural Language Understanding, which results in a higher search result accuracy than the previous search functionality on the website.
The Support team can easily manage and add questions and answer to help Odie to best assist users. Odie is a reliable, scalable and cost-effective solution for lowering support costs and improving the support user experience.
Key Outcomes for the Business
Facilitate Seamless Live Communication
Odie welcomes visitors to the Open Data Hub website and assists with the most common queries. Odie guides the user to help them find what they are looking for and can surface lesser-known datasets that were previously buried behind search screens.
Make Customer Service
Available 24/7
Odie is available 24*7 to answer questions which reduces the response time to users, which in turn reduces frustration and user-drop off. Connecting users with the right data results in a higher degree of innovation and higher quality transport products.
Get Constant Improvement
Over Time
Odie sends reports providing insights to the Open Data team helping them understand common requests and train Odie to be more useful. This results in less manual support time needed and reduces the operating costs of the team.