Social security is a complicated and wide-ranging topic that can be difficult to grasp for many of our customers. We often receive feedback from customers criticising the language we use as difficult to understand and telling us about the challenges of completing benefit applications. Based on that feedback, we have taken steps to simplify the language we use and to streamline the applications. One of the ways we have tried to make it easier to discover and interpret information and to complete benefit applications has been to deploy a chatbot. After launching our first chatbot in 2017, we have continued to develop it further in a systematic fashion, most recently by offering support and assistance to applicants during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The two chatbots, named Kela-Kelpo and FPA-Folke, help our website visitors by providing basic answers to questions. They have been found to be useful in situations that involve a large volume of information.
We believe that these features and the results we have achieved make the Kela chatbot a strong candidate for the ISSA Good Practice Award.