A complaint about bins used to be a short email or one side of A4. Now it can run to 27 pages, quote case law, and incorrectly cite three Acts of Parliament.
The BBC is the latest to report on a surge in AI-assisted complaints landing on councils, schools and Public Sector teams. Lawyers in Local Government estimate they’d need to double their complaints workforce to keep up.
To be fair, people have always had the right to complain, but now AI has removed the requirement to be good at writing.
The big problem is that only one side of the exchange got the tool. Complainers have AI and they’re not afraid to use it. Nor do they worry about fact-checking before they hit send. Complaints teams have an inbox and a statutory deadline.
That’s the problem our AI tools solve. Write My Reply reads the 20-page complaint, extracts the points actually being made, checks them against your policies and the real legislation (rather than whatever the complainant’s chatbot invented) and drafts a response for an officer to review and sign.
The evidence sits behind it, so you can show what was considered and why, all at the press of a button if you ned it for an ombudsman or auditor.
A real person still reviews and decides, they still press send, they just don’t lose a morning to 27 pages of nonsense about bins.
And the counter-argument in the article deserves an answer too. A teacher in makes the point that maybe the issue is the inability to speak to a human in public services any more.
That may be a fair point, but there’s no budget or appetite for increasing Public Sector headcounts for complaints. Surely a better answer is to give existing teams the tools to get their time (and sanity) back?
Whatever sector you’re in, if your complaints volumes have gone through the roof this year, don’t worry. You’re not alone.
