PITB Citizen Contact Center — AI-powered citizen services at scale.

The challenge

The Punjab Information Technology Board operates Punjab's primary citizen helpline — a single number handling enquiries, complaints, and service requests for over 30 government departments, from driving licence authorities and land record offices to district health authorities and police divisions. Over 110,000 citizens call every month, the vast majority speaking Urdu or Punjabi, with a significant share calling from rural Punjab where literacy rates make digital self-service channels impractical.

Before Poocho AI, the helpline faced two compounding problems. First, a 40% misrouting rate: citizens would describe their issue in natural Urdu, be routed to a department by a human operator who misclassified the intent, and then need to re-call and wait again. Second, when calls were transferred correctly, the receiving agent had no information about what the citizen had already explained — forcing citizens to repeat everything from scratch. Average wait time during peak hours exceeded 12 minutes. Complaint re-call rates were running above 35%, consuming agent capacity without resolving new issues.

PITB's additional constraint was that all citizen data — including call audio, identity information, and complaint records — had to remain entirely within Punjab government infrastructure. No call content could be routed to commercial cloud platforms.

The solution

Poocho AI was deployed on-premise within PITB's government data center as the intelligent first-response and triage layer for the Punjab Citizens Helpline. The system handles inbound calls in natural spoken Urdu and Punjabi, classifying citizen intent across 47 distinct service categories spanning all 30+ participating departments.

For enquiries that fall within the AI's resolution scope — department operating hours, required documents for a service application, status of a registered complaint, eligibility criteria for a government programme — Poocho AI resolves the call directly and closes it without agent involvement. For enquiries requiring human action, Poocho AI routes the call to the correct department queue and delivers a structured case summary to the receiving agent's screen before the call connects: caller identity, spoken complaint verbatim, classified intent category, any relevant service reference numbers mentioned, and the call timestamp. Agents receive the citizen fully briefed, eliminating re-explanation.

Integration was built with PITB's existing Punjab Citizen Management System (PCMS) and Punjab e-Services portal, allowing Poocho AI to perform live status lookups on complaint reference numbers and e-service application IDs in real time during the call.

Results

Measured over the first 60 days of live operation, Poocho AI resolved 55% of inbound enquiries without any agent transfer — either answering the question directly or providing service status from PCMS. For routed calls, department misrouting dropped from 40% to 23%, a 42% reduction. Average citizen wait time fell from 12 minutes to under 3 minutes. Complaint re-call rates dropped from 35% to 14% within the first month as agents received accurate case summaries and could act without re-clarification.

"Our agents were spending the first three minutes of every transferred call listening to citizens repeat themselves. Poocho AI eliminated that entirely — every transfer now arrives with a structured summary the agent can act on immediately. The misrouting reduction alone justified the entire deployment."

Deployment timeline