Hampshire and Thames Valley Police cut emergency call answer times from 30 minutes to 2.5-3 minutes using an AI assistant called Bobby. The system handles 70% of routine reports like bike theft automatically, prevented 163,000 unnecessary contacts, and helped escalate a vulnerable teenager to an officer in ten minutes.
Hampshire Police control room, what's your emergency?
Can you get to the side of the road?
Stay calm and keep breathing.
Can you describe him for me? I'm going to stay on the line.
Is the perpetrator still in the vehicle?
Okay, just when you're obvious landmarks to help him put your location.
I've been here the whole time.
It is an incredibly hard job. That call could be somebody that's in real danger, that is in a car accident, that's been assaulted. You really learn to be able to control your tone and your words because that's the only thing you've got. Your voice. Thames Valley Police, what's your emergency? You've got to do it because you want to help people.
It's generally not a good day when somebody has to contact the police, and you're at the end of that over and over again. It's a huge volume, about 1.3, 1.4 million calls. 400,000 of those calls were people contacting us to speak about something they'd already reported, and that's failure demand.
Our worst time, we were at 30 minutes answering those calls. Now, having Salesforce technologies, what we're seeing is about 2.5, 3 minutes. We can reduce that failed demand. We have greater capacity to deal with more impactful crimes.
Salesforce takes things to the next level for us. What you look for is a piece of technology that's a game changer in the industry, and Salesforce was doing just that. Our Victus portal and automated messaging is made up of Data360, MuleSoft Experience Cloud, and then most recently we've put AgentForce as our agentic overlay for people to have conversations with Bobby, our agent. Agent that sits on our victims portal and also our force website.
Bobby itself is ingenious. I know it's a big change for policing. 70% of those people are self-serving because Bobby's doing the job.
If someone had their bike stolen, Bobby would take all the information on their behalf, record the crime, put it into our record management system, understand where the state of their crime is. We're answering their calls quicker and more effectively.
We saw 163,000 fewer contacts The key bit in that is that you don't need any human interaction. bobby allows our humans to concentrate on the 25%, which is your high-harm aspects of the work that we do. There was a young lad of 16 who was witnessing a violent argument between his parents. He couldn't have safely phoned at that point. bobby identified the potential for harm, passed him through to one of our digital desk operators, and we were able to get a police officer out and de-escalate it within 10 minutes. That's absolutely huge and completely unexpected. If we did not have Bobby, that crime would never have been reported.
The immediate actions of Bobby meant that that person was safeguarded. This is what we're there for. We're there to protect people. It's a big move, like it's a pioneering move in policing to do this. Every phone call matters. It's about those moments of being the quiet, calm voice on the end of the phone that helps that person out. That for me is what it's about.
