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Serviceplane vs Citibot

Citibot is a resident-engagement chat and voice product for cities and 311 agencies. Serviceplane is a full service desk for public agencies: every channel on one case, answers only from approved knowledge, records behind identity verification, staff inboxes on Microsoft 365, and an audit trail an auditor can verify.

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In their words

What Citibot says it is

Citibot | AI Resident Engagement Solutions for Government Agencies

“Citibot’s AI chat and voice tools empower government agencies to provide 24/7 multilingual support — ensuring equitable, accessible service through multichannel delivery.”

From citibot.io, 2026-09-22. Their words, not ours; we keep this current and will correct it on request.

Where Citibot is a good fit

Cities and 311 agencies that want resident-facing chat and voice with broad language coverage, from a vendor focused on municipalities.

What we built differently

Where Serviceplane is different, stated as facts about Serviceplane

Each row is something you can check in a walkthrough. None of it is a claim about how Citibot works inside.

One case across phone, text, chat, email and web forms

A phone call on the organization's own number, a text, an email to a shared mailbox, a chat and a web form all open or continue one numbered case. Voice is not a bolt-on: the assistant takes the call itself, texts a link mid-call, and a call-back inside a short window continues the same case.

Channels

Your records, behind identity verification

A read-only replica of property or account records with a link back to your system of record; on public channels the assistant states record data only after the person proves identity with what the record already holds. Staff see records in their own workspace.

Records · Identity

An audit trail the customer can verify, not just read

Every action by the assistant or a person is an append-only event, SHA-256 hash-chained to the one before. A read-only auditor role, filters and CSV/JSON export, a verification call that names the first bad event, and a nightly export to storage you own with a digest ledger. How the record is built.

Audit

Answers only from approved knowledge, and a gate before go-live

Retrieval is limited to content a person approved; an approved answer card is returned verbatim; no matching source means the assistant abstains and offers a person. Every channel starts in shadow mode and goes live only when reviewed accuracy clears the bar you set (95% by default). How grounding is enforced.

Grounded · Shadow mode

Built for the public sector's constraints

Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes and SharePoint with their permissions, single sign-on and SCIM from your directory (no passwords stored), retention per channel with legal hold, one-file case export for records requests, WCAG 2.1 AA tested in CI, 60 languages detected automatically. For government.

Government

A person is one hand-off away, and then the assistant steps back

Hand-off routes to the least-recently-routed available colleague inside published hours, or files the case for the right team after hours with the resident told when staff are back. Once a person has the conversation the assistant stops answering on it — no two voices in one thread.

Hand-off

Shortlisting

Questions from teams comparing the two

We're a county, not a city. Does that matter?

Serviceplane's first deployments were shaped by a county assessor's office and a water utility: property and account records with identity verification, department shared mailboxes on Microsoft 365, SharePoint knowledge with permissions, a Board of Equalization–style escalation path, and an audit trail that survives a records request. What an agency gets.

What about languages?

Sixty languages on every channel, detected automatically from the first message or call; the assistant answers in the resident's language, and hand-off wording, receipts and the chat widget follow it.

Where does resident data go?

Chat text is redacted for card and social-security numbers before it is stored, retention per channel removes content on your schedule, legal hold protects a case from purging, and the audit trail — who did what, when — never contains the text of a resident's message beyond the audit period you set. Nothing is sold or shared.

Can we bring our history over?

Yes. Training mode replays a CSV of past questions and the replies your staff gave, scores how closely the assistant's answers agree, and turns a staff reply into an approved answer card in one click. A FAQ imports in one call. Knowledge comes from your website, uploaded documents and SharePoint — not from a ticket export.

Do you integrate with it?

There is no native connector. Serviceplane exposes signed outbound webhooks for every event and tenant-scoped API keys, and reads from Microsoft 365, SharePoint and your records replica. If both systems need to run side by side for a while, the webhook stream is how the other one hears about cases.

Is it cheaper?

We don't publish a price comparison and won't guess at theirs. Serviceplane is sold by the module, so an organization pays for the channels and capabilities it switches on. Ask for a quote with your channel mix and volumes.

Can we try it without switching?

That is how every deployment starts: a channel in shadow mode answers to a private log while your current setup keeps running, and you compare the pairs before anything is public.

The three things every comparison comes down to

Bring a real resident question. We'll answer it from your own pages.

A workspace built from your public site in an afternoon, a conversation with a hand-off to a named team, and the audit trail that went with it.

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