UK police built a Salesforce chatbot. A contact costs 27p, versus £7.80 for staff.
Thames Valley Police and Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary operate a shared contact service.
It handles about 1.4 million contacts a year. Around 400,000 are people seeking a case update or the officer in charge.
Waits for the non-emergency line in Hampshire averaged 27 minutes, and up to one and a half hours at peak, digital director Tom Kempster told diginomica. Meeting the four-minute target with more staff would have cost an extra £11 million, he said.
The forces first moved the contact desk onto Salesforce CRM, software that tracks each contact. Their chatbot, Bobbi, was then built in four days and tested for 15 weeks. It went live in November 2025. Its instructions and guardrails came from 93 existing contact documents.
Bobbi cannot take a report of an offence. When it detects a high chance of harm, it routes the contact to staff. Kempster said an average Bobbi contact costs 27 pence. One handled by a staff member costs £7.80.
The article reports just over 200 calls handled so far, 45% of them fully automated. It does not say how the 27p is calculated or what the licences cost. Bobbi is joining two more UK forces, which Kempster said only need to localise the templates.
Sources
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