Cabarrus County, NC streamlines applications for ERAP funding with chatbot and Laserfiche forms

Chatbot for Emergency Rental Assistance Program, Cabarrus County, N.C. - StateScoop

Responses by Deborah Brannan, area county manager of strategy and innovation. How has your chatbot improved operations? We started out using a chatbot to do a pre-qualification for Emergency Rental Assistance funding. It asks the minimum qualifications to determine whether the applicant makes less than 80% of the area median income and to make sure that they have been affected by COVID and that has done a great job. We had probably over 1,000 submissions that were pretty much disqualified by the chatbot and that was important because we found that getting the applications in wasn’t the problem. Eligibility verification by social workers was a little bit of a bottleneck. So keeping those 1,000 applications out of the queue has really helped make sure that those who actually qualified are processed faster. What have you learned about your residents through this project? Instead of being faced with this humongous form […]