A baseline, agreed first
Response times, triage volumes, contact-to-assessment days, complaint rates and cost per assessment — agreed with your BI team before anything changes.
Impact
The measures we will be judged on
We have not run a pilot yet, so we will not quote results we do not have. What follows is the measurement plan, the dashboard a council would see, and the scenarios we would test against — all clearly illustrative.
Illustrative modelling only · not a forecast, not a promise · every figure to be replaced by measured pilot data
What the dashboard shows
Six measures, chosen because they are the ones a Director of Adult Social Services is already accountable for. Nothing here is a vanity metric.
- Time to first response < 1 hr 24/7, any channel
- Triage within 24 hours 92% target ≥ 90%
- Contact-to-assessment −22% median days vs baseline
- AI draft acceptance 84% target ≥ 80%
- Carer assessment offer rate 96% offered by default
- Cost per assessment −11% agency and OT spend avoided
Targets shown are the design targets the pilot would be measured against, not achieved results.
The evidence
Three views of the same question
The arithmetic
What the benefit could be worth
Per council, per year, at the scale of a mid-sized authority. These are modelled scenarios for a pilot business case — they are not results, and we will publish the measured figures alongside them when we have them.
| Benefit line | Conservative | Base | Optimistic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Practitioner admin hours released | 2,700 h | 4,500 h | 6,300 h |
| Value of released hours (£38/hr) | £102,600 | £171,000 | £239,400 |
| Avoided agency and OT spend | £22,500 | £45,000 | £67,500 |
| Reduced complaint handling | £60,000 | £120,000 | £180,000 |
| Total quantified (illustrative) | ~£185k | ~£336k | ~£487k |
Assumptions: released practitioner hours valued at £38/hour; benefit only counted where the front door changes the volume or timeliness of work. A council-specific model is built with your finance team during a pilot scoping exercise.
Honesty
The dis-benefits, named
Every honest business case has a column that says what gets worse. Ours would include the following, and a pilot would be designed to test them.
- New work at the front door. Making it easy to ask will increase the volume of enquiries. That is the point — but it needs staffing.
- Practitioner time on verification. Drafts must be checked. If acceptance rates fall, the time saving disappears.
- Digital exclusion. Some people will not use a conversation interface, and must be routed to a human without friction.
- Governance overhead. A model in a statutory service needs assurance, audit and incident handling — real staff time, not a footnote.
- Change fatigue. Another system, however good, is another system, unless it replaces work rather than adding it.
If a pilot shows the dis-benefits outweighing the benefits, we would rather publish that than sell you a second year.
Assurance
How we would measure it
A control cohort
Where volume allows, run the front door alongside the current route so the comparison is real rather than before-and-after.
Published results
A joint report at the end of the pilot, including the measures that did not improve. We would rather be held to that than to a slide.
Build the business case with us
Bring your baseline numbers and we will model the scenarios for your authority — including the ones that do not flatter us.