Normalized claim
Back-office task duration: 87.5% decrease
Back-office tasks that took a week now take an hour using Copilot.
Whakarongorau Aotearoa: Copilot Studio and Azure agent 'Welcome' to reduce telehealth admin and improve at-risk contact handling
Use case typeCustomer service agentUpdated Jul 2, 2025
Whakarongorau Aotearoa delivers New Zealand's national telehealth services, supporting more than 700,000 people a year across over 30 services. The organisation faced rising at-risk contact demand, longer contact times, and admin tasks consuming counsellor time. It deployed Microsoft Copilot to reduce admin burden by summarising interaction notes, built a Copilot Studio agent to help staff search across hundreds of clinical and non-clinical policies, and implemented an Azure-backed 'Welcome' agent for 1737 mental health SMS and Women’s Refuge webchat to greet contacts, gather context, and hold them until a counsellor is available. The design included guardrails so users always know whether they are interacting with AI or a human, and AI does not diagnose, counsel, treat, or provide clinical advice.
- Organization
- Whakarongorau Aotearoa
- Industry
- Healthcare
- Location
- New Zealand
- Published
- July 2025
Reported outcomes
−87.5%
back-office task durationTime & speed
30%organization adoption97%daily active adoption among licensed users+50%mental health contacts longer on average
Strategic outcomes
Customer experience & trustInstant frontline response and less queue silenceSpeed & agilityClinicians start support faster with captured contextOther strategic outcomeCounsellor time redirected from admin to careRisk & complianceClear human-AI boundaries and strong privacy guardrails
Why do we believe this?Outcome claims, sources, and evidence checks
Normalized claim
Organization adoption: 30%
Roughly 30 per cent of the organisation now uses it.
Correction recorded Jul 26, 2026 · Previously: 30% increase · Marked the 30% figure as an absolute adoption rate, not an increase.
Normalized claim
Daily active adoption among licensed users: 97%
97 per cent of licensed users now using it daily.
Correction recorded Jul 26, 2026 · Previously: 97% increase · Marked the 97% figure as an absolute daily adoption rate, not an increase.
Normalized claim
Mental health contacts longer on average: 50% increase
Mental health contacts now take 50 per cent longer on average.
Why do we believe this deployment?Customer identity, provider attribution, maturity, and source checks
- Customer
- Whakarongorau Aotearoa
- Provider
- Microsoft
- Maturity
- Production
- Linked source
- Microsoft Customer Stories
It deployed Microsoft Copilot to reduce admin burden by summarising interaction notes, built a Copilot Studio agent to help staff search across hundreds of clinical and non-clinical policies, and implemented an Azure-backed 'Welcome' agent for 1737 mental health SMS and Women’s Refuge webchat to greet contacts, gather context, and hold them until a counsellor is available
Customer identity supportedSource describes one deploymentMaturity supported
Primary read
Use case focus
Showing 3 of 3
- 1Customer service agent
- 2Workflow automation
- 3Search modernization
- At-risk contacts had nearly doubled over five years.
- Mental health contacts were taking longer on average.
- Admin tasks were consuming valuable counsellor time.
- Microsoft Copilot was used to summarise interaction notes and reduce admin burden.
- A Copilot Studio agent was built for staff to search across hundreds of clinical, non-clinical and technical policies.
- An Azure-backed 'Welcome' agent was deployed for SMS and webchat to gather context and keep people engaged until a counsellor was available.
- Guardrails were put in place to preserve confidentiality, privacy and clear human-AI boundaries.
- Back-office tasks that once took a week now take an hour.
- Around 30% of the organisation uses the policy-search Copilot Studio agent.
- 97% of licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot users use it daily.
- The 'Welcome' agent provides an instant response and captures details so clinicians can start support faster.
Architecture
Microsoft Copilot is used for summarising interaction notes; Copilot Studio powers an internal policy-search agent; and an Azure-backed 'Welcome' agent is integrated into 1737 SMS and Women’s Refuge webchat workflows with safeguards to distinguish AI from human support and to avoid clinical advice.
Sources & evidence1
Evidence: Medium65/100Evidence strength
- Customer explicitly identified
- Deployment status explicitly supported
- Primary source available
- Quantified outcome available
- Technical implementation details available
Type: Customer StoryPublished: Jul 2, 2025Publisher: MicrosoftEvidence: PrimaryConfidence: High
AI-generated summary. Verify important details with the linked sources before relying on this case.
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