How BotForge Built CEECEE for the Customs Clearance Consortium

When the UK left the EU on 1 January 2021, thousands of traders faced customs formalities for the first time, and Brexit was expected to add 200 million customs declarations a year. The Customs Clearance Consortium needed a way to give them import and export information around the clock.

The Challenge

The consortium struggled to help traders through complex acronyms, jargon and customs procedures. Traders needed to know the right documentation route, submission method and timing for each declaration, which decides whether goods pass smoothly through the border. Staff also needed quick access to the right information to advise efficiently.

The Approach

BotForge built CEECEE, a customs assistant on Google Dialogflow ES with a helpful, informal personality.

• 240+ intents, each with multiple training phrases
• Route-specific guidance, identifying countries and transit options
• Plain-language explanations of customs terms and acronyms
• Multi-turn flows with qualifying questions for complex scenarios
• Entity extraction, context memory and automatic spelling correction
• Fallback and handoff: varied responses over three turns, then handover to a human agent

The team trained CEECEE on PDF documents, customer enquiry data, knowledge connectors and standard customer support datasets. The Chatseer analytics platform gives staff chat transcripts, analytics and reports to keep improving it. CEECEE runs in both the public and members-only areas of the website, with a responsive, mobile-friendly interface.

The Outcome

Traders can get customs information 24 hours a day, and consortium agents use CEECEE for training and help with complex queries. Handing over to people only when needed reduces the load on advisory staff, and the chatbot keeps learning as customs rules change.