Information about our digital assistant Nova
What is Nova?
Nova is our friendly digital assistant to help you find information on our services. Think of it like having your own personal assistant on our website who can answer your questions and help you with tasks relating to Bins and Recycling, Council Tax, Housing, Planning, Benefits and some Norfolk County Council enquiries.
The digital assistant is an additional service that compliments our web chat service. Nova uses generative AI to understand what you ask and reply to you in a human-like way.
Chat with Nova on our website
From anywhere on our website, click on the ‘Chat with Nova’ image on the right-hand side of the screen. To start chatting, choose ‘Start Chat’ to confirm you have read and understood our Privacy Notice.
To get the best out of Nova, start questions with, “How do I…,” “I want to…” or “Can I…,” but don’t make them too long and try not to personalise your question.
Nova uses our website to provide you with tailored answers to your questions.
If you don't get the answer you're looking for, try asking it in a different way – you’ll always be able to chat with a member of the Council Information Centre during normal office hours if you need more help or your enquiry relates to a different service.
At the end of your chat, Nova will ask for feedback on your experience, please tell us if the answer was helpful and take the time to complete our quick survey.
Why have we introduced Nova
Whether our web chat service uses a digital helper or is answered by an advisor in the Council Information Centre, there will always be changes in demand and a wide range of services that people need help with.
The Council Information Centre team can only manage a certain number of enquiries, especially when we deal with lots of services. However, Nova can deal with many requests at a time. Rather than being put on hold, Nova will try to answer your question (at the same time as answering lots of other people’s queries) and if it can’t, or if it detects you need immediate help, it’ll route your enquiry to the Council Information Centre team as soon as possible.
It’s important for us to ensure that we always have alternative ways for you to contact us. Most customers ask similar questions about a few services, with many enquiries having quick and simple answers. By introducing a digital helper to manage these enquiries, our team can focus on the more complex enquiries and the customers who are unable to access our digital services.
We always check how Nova’s working and we need you to chat with Nova to help improve the service. Nova is like a super-smart robot that’s trained in some of our services. Nova continuously learns from the responses provided by the Council Information Centre team and listens to your feedback. The more Nova learns, the better they get at understanding and generating answers to your queries that will feel more natural and helpful.