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Solution · Customer serviceFour channels, one register, and a reference number the resident can quote
One front door for everything a resident reports
Every report a resident makes, whichever way it arrives, becomes one register entry with a location, a category and a named unit; duplicates are merged and people decide.
Executive summary
A broken street light reported three ways becomes three separate jobs, two of them invisible.
We build one register and one intake, deliberately nothing else.
Every report has one entry, one reference and one named unit, whichever channel carried it.
the register in Microsoft Lists; the correspondence register for reports that are formal correspondence; the units' own work systems where they have one
Business problem
Resident services
Residents report things because the city is theirs to use and something in it has stopped working. An office does right by offering several ways to say so: a telephone number, a published address, a form on the website, an app. Each was opened by a different unit in a different year, and each keeps its own record. That is as far as the thinking went.
What the office loses is not the report, it is the joining up. A fault reported by e‑mail is invisible to the officer taking a call about it an hour later, so two units schedule one job or neither does. Residents who telephone twice a week get attention; residents who report once and wait politely do not, and no rule intended that. The front desk spends its day sorting post for other units, and unit heads receive forwarded e‑mails with no location, no photograph and no history.
At scale the arrangement absorbs nothing. A storm or a week of leaf fall triples the volume, and the constraint is not the repair crews but the four people reading and forwarding. Underneath sits the number nobody has: what residents actually report, where and how often. Budgets for lighting and pavements are argued from impression, because the office cannot count its own post.
How it works today
This is the routine in offices of this size, whatever the reporting app looks like.
- PersonA resident telephones, and the front desk writes it down or forwards it to whichever unit seems right
- PersonReports to the general address are passed on by hand; those sent straight to a unit never pass the office at all
- SystemThe reporting app keeps its own list, opened by the two people with an account when they remember to
- WaitingA report waits until a unit accepts it, and nothing records how long it waited or with whom
- Risk of errorOne fault is opened three times, two crews are sent, and two of the three residents never hear anything back
- Risk of errorA letter that is really a complaint or an information request is worked as a fault, never registered as correspondence
- PersonOnce a month a count is assembled for management from three lists that do not agree
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The bill that never reaches the budget.
- Forwarding is invisible work: in nobody's job description, never measured, done by the people residents most need free at the counter.
- Duplicates are paid for on both sides. Two units plan one repair, and several residents are answered separately about it, every answer written from scratch.
- A resident who hears nothing does not conclude that the office is busy. They report it again, then write to a councillor, and the office answers for its silence rather than the fault.
- Evidence is missing when it is needed. Somebody writes that they reported this in March, and the history is rebuilt from mailboxes, if at all.
Cost of inaction
Three lists that disagree is a survivable condition, and being survivable is exactly what keeps it in place. Nobody is idle, every unit can show what it did, and each channel produces a record that looks complete from inside the unit keeping it. The failure is spread one resident at a time and never lands on a day anyone would call bad.
What accumulates is harder to price. A resident who reported a fault twice and heard nothing writes to a councillor, and the office spends a week answering for its silence rather than fixing the light. Worse, it keeps losing the argument it most needs to win: asking for money for lighting, it brings an impression where somebody else brings a table.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A city office serving about 180,000 residents, roughly 520 staff, with a roads unit, a greenery unit, a cleaning company and a housing manager doing the physical work; Microsoft 365 is already in place.
About 3,700 resident reports a month: roughly 1,300 by telephone, 1,050 by e‑mail, 800 through the website form and 550 through the app. Twelve to eighteen in a hundred repeat something already reported.
Each channel is read by whoever owns it and forwarded onward. No shared list, no reference a resident can quote, no catalogue of which unit handles what.
About eight minutes per report of registration, routing and feedback, spread across the front desk, the receiving unit and whoever answers the resident.
All four channels write into one queue. UiPath Communications Mining proposes a category and the fields the unit needs, the address is normalised, and a report describing a known fault is linked to it rather than opened again. Units work their queues in Microsoft Teams; residents get a reference at once and a message at closure.
The office holds one number for what residents reported, every report leaves a trace with a date and a unit against it, and the front desk stops sorting other people's post. Modelled figures, arithmetic on stated assumptions.
Proposed solution
We build one register and one intake, deliberately nothing else. Every channel writes into the same queue: the app, the web form, the reports mailbox, and the form the front desk fills in during a call. UiPath Communications Mining reads the free text and proposes a category, an urgency signal and the fields a unit cannot work without: where, what and since when. The address is normalised against the office's street register.
Then the register does what four separate lists cannot. Before an entry is created, open reports of the same category near the same place are checked, and a match is linked to the first rather than opened again. Every link and classification carries a confidence score, and the office sets the line below which a person decides; under it, and for possible formal correspondence, the report waits for an officer who confirms or changes it in Microsoft Teams.
Units receive a queue instead of a forwarded e‑mail: location, photograph, category, everyone else who reported the same thing, and one card to accept it or send it back as not theirs. The resident gets a reference and, at closure, one message. The office finally gets what it never had: a weekly picture by category, unit and district.
UiPath Communications Mining intents, fields and confidence scores; UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers and audit log; UiPath Action Center tasks assigned to groups and completed inside Microsoft Teams; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Outlook 365, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint; Microsoft Lists; Power BI
The intake from four channels, the category and unit model trained on your reports, address normalisation and the duplicate rule, the register and its history, the unit queues and their escalation, the messages to residents
The reporting app and the web form, through whatever interfaces they publish; a write of the reference into your correspondence register where a report is formal correspondence
How the automated process works
- AutomationAll four channels write into one queue, including the form the front desk fills in during a call
- AutomationCommunications Mining proposes a category, an urgency signal and the fields the unit needs, and the address is normalised
- AutomationOpen reports of the same category near the same place are checked; a match is linked to the first, not opened again
- PersonLow-confidence classifications, proposed links and possible formal correspondence reach the front desk as a card in Microsoft Teams
- AutomationThe register entry is written with a reference, which the resident receives on the channel they used
- PersonThe responsible unit accepts the report in its Teams queue, records what will be done and closes it when the work is done
- AutomationOne closing message goes to everyone behind that fault, unaccepted reports escalate to the head of unit, and the weekly picture reaches Teams and Power BI
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Taking reports in from four channels, reading the text and proposing a category, a unit and missing fields
- Recognising that the same fault was already reported nearby, and linking the second report to the first
- Writing the register entry, issuing the reference, sending the acknowledgement and the closing message, and escalating what nobody accepts
People decide
- What a report actually is: the classification is a proposal, and an officer confirms or changes it before anything is routed
- Whether something is a fault to repair or correspondence that must be registered as a case and answered under the office's procedure; a robot never makes that call and it signs nothing
- What the unit will do, when and at what cost, plus the category list, the threshold, the merge radius and the escalation times, all of which stay with the office
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Where a rule suffices we do not use a model. Where judgement is needed, a person decides.
Inputs
- the reporting app
- the form on the authority's website
- the reports mailbox
- telephone and counter reports typed into the same form by the front desk
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Communications Mining
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- the register in Microsoft Lists
- the correspondence register for reports that are formal correspondence
- the units' own work systems where they have one
- Power BI
Human touchpoints: unit queues in Microsoft Teams; front-desk confirmation cards in UiPath Action Center; the weekly picture in a Teams channel
Technologies used
proposes a category, an urgency signal and the fields the unit needs, each with a confidence score
Aqueue every report, read the mailbox, normalise the address, run the duplicate and routing rules, write the register and post to unit channels
Aunit queues and front-desk confirmations answered inside Teams, assigned to groups and escalated
Athe register: one row per report, with its reference, links, states and history
Athe weekly and monthly picture by category, unit and district
Asupplies each report with its location and attachments, receives the reference and closing status
CIllustrative economic model
Start by questioning the assumptions.
Four channels, one report, and the same eight minutes whichever way it arrives: reading it, deciding whose it is, forwarding it, checking whether the office already knows and writing something back. The repair sits outside the model, with the work order and the contractor. €18 an hour is a fully loaded cost of an administrative post. Nothing below was measured in an office, the three inputs are yours to replace, and the arithmetic counts capacity returned to the units, never a saving.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- Every report has one entry, one reference and one named unit, whichever channel carried it
- Residents hear something the same day whichever channel they used: a reference when they report, a message when the work is closed
- One fault reported by eight people is worked once and answered eight times, removing both the duplicate crew and the duplicate letter
- The front desk stops sorting for other units and spends its time on the resident in front of it
- The office can state with evidence what residents report, where and how often, the number every budget discussion has been missing
The management view
- Volume stops being an opinion: what arrived, in which category, district and unit is one query, and every room gets one number
- Capacity moves on evidence rather than on which street complains loudest, because load is visible by unit, category and district
- Equal treatment becomes demonstrable rather than asserted: a quiet report and a persistent one carry the same reference, clock and escalation, and nothing depends on who is at the desk this week
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Control is not an add-on.
- The robot signs in with its own account, its password held in the platform's credential store. It writes register entries, links them and sends messages from the office's address; it cannot close a report or decide that something is not the authority's business.
- Personal data is limited by design: the register holds a contact channel and the fault, the weekly picture a location and a category, no name.
- Every proposal the model made and every correction an officer made stays with the entry, so a report's route can be rebuilt a year later without a mailbox search.
- Register, messages and reports stay inside the authority's own Microsoft 365 tenant, the robots run from the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud, and the category list, threshold, merge radius and escalation times are settings the office changes itself, versioned on each change.
Why now
Simplifying this by closing channels is not available to a Polish authority. NIK's audit of digital exclusion, P/24/065, reports that 15% of people in Poland had never used the internet in 2022, against 9% across the EU, and puts the digitally excluded at about 3.8 million, more than 3.6 million of them aged 55 to 74. The telephone stays, so the joining up happens behind it.
The sorting is already being paid for: a modelled €8,880 a month of administrative time moving reports between channels before any repair is scheduled, and the bill grows with every new channel.
The components are ordinary now. Communications Mining returns a label with a confidence score instead of a guess, an Action Center task assigned to a unit's group is answered inside Microsoft Teams, and Orchestrator runs the intake on event and time triggers.
Relevant executive roles
One register answers what residents reported, when, and what the authority did about each report
The front desk stops sorting other units' post and answers the person in front of it
Work arrives as a queue with a location, a photograph and every other report of that fault
Common questions and objections
It proposes and a person confirms. Below the threshold your office sets, and for anything that might be formal correspondence, the report waits for an officer at the front desk. The category list is yours, and so is the threshold.
Which is why the telephone stays as it is. The officer taking the call types the report into the same form a resident would use, so it gets a reference and a register entry like any other, and the picture stops leaning towards residents who are online.
An app is one channel. This is the register behind all of them, including the telephone, the counter and the e‑mails sent straight to a unit, which is why its list has never matched the office's own count.
When this is not the right solution
- Offices taking a few hundred reports a month through one channel, where a shared list and a rota cost less than an integration
- Offices whose units have no agreed catalogue of what each handles; that list has to exist before anything can be routed to it
- Authorities wanting the repair itself automated, the work order and the contractor's invoice, which is different work on different systems
A question for the next management meeting
If a resident tells us at a meeting that they reported the same broken street light three times since spring, could this office confirm or deny it on the spot, and say what happened to each report?
Implementation approach
We start with one slice of the process and extend only once it is proven.
We deliver
- A read of one month of your reports from every channel, sorted into the categories your units actually work in
- The category and unit model trained on your own text, with the confidence threshold set by the office
- Address normalisation against your street register, and the duplicate rule with its radius and time window
- The register in Microsoft Lists with its references and history, the unit queues in Microsoft Teams, and escalation for what nobody accepts
- The weekly picture by category, unit and district, and a short runbook for the front desk
We need from you
- One month of reports from every channel, telephone notes included, however they are kept today
- An owner for the category list, normally the secretary or head of resident services, and two piloting units
- Read access to the reporting app and the web form, and a technical account in your tenant
- The street register the office already treats as authoritative
Stages
Discovery
One month of reports read with the units: categories, who owns what, how often one fault arrives twice
Design
The category list, the confidence threshold, the merge rule, the escalation times, the security model
Build
Intake from four channels, the model, the register, the Teams queues, the messages to residents
Validation
A parallel run on real reports, with the units checking every proposed category and link
Go-live
Two units live under supervision, then the rest, with the model retrained on officers' corrections
Departmental. Effort is driven by how many categories the units need, whether the app and the web form publish a usable interface, and how consistently addresses are recorded.
A resident should not have to know which unit owns the pothole before reporting it.
Send us one month of your reports from every channel, telephone notes included. You get back a category list built from your own text, the share that repeats something already reported, and a sketch of where the register would sit.
Merge one month of resident reportsThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Deadlines live in the case system, a departmental spreadsheet and somebody's memory.
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