Meet Awhi: an AI-powered chatbot that helps a small team save time and effort in servicing the community

The website search bar is good, Helpfruit is better

Like many local councils, Western Bay of Plenty District Council’s website holds an extensive and diverse body of information. From event information and council services to everything in between – this information needs to be stored and presented to residents when they need it, quickly and efficiently.

Typically, the council website holds all this information: regulatory content, policies and bylaws, agendas and meeting minutes, service pages, location details for facilities across the district, and even waste collection schedules. This is the norm, and it works okay, but it’s not as fast and intuitive as it can be.

For the Western Bay of Plenty District Council, they wanted to give their residents, as well as their small customer service team, a better way to find and present the practical service information they need.

“We have volumes of information and when a customer is looking for an answer using the search bar, it's not a very intuitive result. They bring back screens and screens of information that are not helpful and often outdated.” – Valeta Duncan, Customer and Library Services Manager, Western Bay of Plenty District Council

Transforming a district council’s customer service with an AI chatbot: faster search, instant answers and privacy-first design

After trialling Helpfruit alongside competitors, the Western Bay of Plenty District Council chose Helpfruit. This gave their residents an AI-powered chatbot called Awhi. Awhi is a conversational, self-service chatbot built on their website content and knowledge base, configured to provide residents with instant answers.

Awhi-bot Highlights

• Easy setup: Western Bay of Plenty District Council found Awhi simple and fast to configure, especially with the use of Helpfruit’s Knowledge Juicer, which helps with document ingestion, turning uploaded PDFs and other documents into chat-ready Q&A material for Awhi.
• Content scope control: Awhi is secure by design and was configured to only use the council’s content, avoiding irrelevant internet sources.
• Multi-language feature: Western Bay of Plenty District Council especially loved the multi-language feature, making it easy for residents to speak to the chatbot in their language.
• Self-service, team-vetted, and transparent AI answers: Awhi will first refer to your specified knowledge sources to answer questions. Its built-in AI assistant capability will only respond if the chatbot can’t find a relevant published answer – alongside a disclaimer that it’s an AI-generated response.

Helpfruit Results

• Engagement: a whopping increase of over 2,000 questions and conversations recorded from launch to the time of this case study (August 2025 to November 2025).
• Time savings: the council reports significant reductions in time spent answering phones, replying to emails, and handling paperwork.
• Operational impact: analytics and configured answers have reduced repetitive enquiries and sped up resident self-service.

Other Key Takeaways

• The Helpfruit team helped configure the chatbot and trained the Western Bay team
• Helpfruit document ingestion sped up the project and delivered results quickly
• Helpfruit's assistant answers draw only from trusted site content to avoid irrelevant external results.
• Helpfruit’s multi-language feature is proven to be transformative for diverse audiences.
• Helpfruit turns unanswered questions into insights to help prioritise website content fixes and reduce future enquiries.

Whether you’re a council, a service provider, or a growing business, the goal is the same: clear answers, delivered fast. Book a free demo or start a free trial with Helpfruit!