Be my Guest… Adam Chipperfield
LEEA launched the Chatbot at LiftEx in Liverpool last year to make it easier for members to access technical advice.
Here to tell us more is Adam Chipperfield, Project Officer, LEEA, who is responsible for planning, organising, overseeing and supporting the delivery of many projects and initiatives at LEEA, including Chatbot, which aims to benefit membership and the lifting industry as a whole.
“There were many reasons for launching Chatbot, and it really had the same sort of reasoning and purpose as many of our other initiatives, which is to help us achieve our vision of zero accidents, injuries and fatalities in the lifting at height industry and how we at LEEA want to accomplish this goal is by transferring knowledge on safe and best practises for the lifting industry,” said Chipperfield.
“We deliver knowledge through our training, membership and technical services, and a big part of that offering is we have a wealth of guidance documents that a lot of our members know they can access on the LEEA website, such as COPSULE (the LEEA Code of Practice for the Safe Use of Lifting Equipment), which contains really important information on the safe use of lifting equipment.”
Chipperfield said the purpose of Chatbot is to make the guidance on the safe use of lifting equipment even more accessible, and quicker and easier to find, as it's able to draw information from its learning option to answer peoples’ questions on safe use of equipment.
“It’s a service which is available to everyone. So members and non-members alike can go to the LEEA website, access the chatbot and type in their question and then the chatbot's going to look for keywords in that question and search for an answer from our knowledgebase, which currently comprises COPSULE, and all of our technical frequently asked questions,” he added.
“In addition to that technical support, there are also a number of non-technical questions on the LEEA website, which has been integrated into the ‘bot knowledgebase’, which is the information it draws from, to answer a question.”
People can access chatbot on their mobile or desktop, or any device they use to access the LEEA website.
“It really is as straightforward as heading over to www.LEEAint.com and you'll find the chatbot straight away on our homepage,” said Chipperfield.
“There are no restrictions on where you can access it from. It's currently only available in English, but because the chatbot is drawing information from LEEA guidance documentation and because that guidance documentation has been written by industry experts who have taken a globally applicable best practice, it really is a service which is available to everyone despite only being currently available in English. And we do look to improve upon that.”
“For now, the questions the service receives are predominantly technical questions because the chatbot was created to bolster our technical service offering. We have a technical triage where members can come to our technical experts and ask a question about lifting equipment and safe use and the chatbot adds another layer to that, so people get even faster responses. We are now also starting to see the emergence of training related questions and membership related questions.
“We're looking to improve and enhance the knowledgebase by having more LEEA membership information and training information fed into the bots knowledgebase so it can answer more questions with a wider variety of subject matter.”
As well as receiving an answer to a question instantaneously, users will receive an e-mail transcript so everything the bot said in an interaction will be automatically emailed to the person afterwards so they have something to refer back to.
“We do appreciate the lifting industry is a very complex world and there's a variety of unique technical questions. We want to assure potential users of the chatbot that even if the bot itself might not have an answer for you immediately, it's backed up by our experts in the technical team who are always on standby to answer,” said Chipperfield.
“The next step for the chatbot is looking to improve our services and in the near future, to be able to answer an even wider variety of both technical and non-technical information such as on their membership and training information. So if you have a question about LEEA or a technical question about lifting equipment, you can come to us to use the chatbot and get a quick and reliable answer, which is always tied to LEEA information or LEEA guidance documentation.”
Next, LEEA is looking forward to celebrating this year’s #GLAD2024 Global lifting Awareness Day on July 18 and LiftEx at London West Olympia, October 16-17 with the prestigious LEEA Awards on October 16.
“If you don't already know, we celebrate #GLAD - Global Lifting Awareness Day, and this really is about the whole industry raising awareness of what they do and we have a dedicated website www.globalliftingawarenessday.com which is now live if you want to head over and educate yourself about what GLAD is and if you can, we really would encourage you to take part,” said Chipperfield.
Click HERE to watch the full video on LEEA YouTube.
For more information on #GLAD2024 visit www.globalliftingawarenessday.com
