Web assistant
Our chat services are quick and easy to use. If you don’t want to wait in busy telephone queues or for us to respond to an email, the Web Assistant will help you find the information and online services on our website.
If required, the Web Assistant will escalate your chat to a member of staff during office hours. If our offices are closed, your chat will be queued and you will receive an email when we have responded.
To access our Web Assistant, click on the chat icon, in the bottom right corner of the page.
When you first use the Web Assistant, you will be asked to provide the following information:
- your name
- your address
We ask for this information as it will allow the Web Assistant to present any previous conversation history that you've had with us. You will only be asked for this information once. If you enquiry progresses to a member of staff, we may ask for more information to verify your identity. More details of how and why we use this data can be found on our privacy policy.
The following services are available on live chat:
- Benefits
- Blue Badges
- Council tax
- Highways
- Household waste and recycling
- Parking services
We also provide a live General Enquiries service that will signpost you to the most appropriate place to resolve your enquiry. If the service you require is not listed above, unfortunately we will be unable to provide any live support.
We are always interested to hear your views on the services we provide so if you have any requests, suggestions or feedback on our Web Assistant, please click on the Feedback button at the bottom of this page.
Telephone
We have made it simpler for you to contact us. Just call 01254 585585 and ask for the service you need.
This is an automated service so you won’t be waiting long to connect through to who you want to speak to. So if you want to speak to school admissions, just say "school admissions" when prompted.
If you don’t know who you need to speak to just say "operator" and you will be transferred to one of our Customer service advisors.
We’ve also added a menu option for our top requested services:
- Press 1 for Benefits, Council tax and Business Rates
- Press 2 for Household waste and recycling
- Press 3 for Social services
- Press 4 for Planning
- Press 5 for Registrars
Face to face
If you visit either Blackburn Town Hall or Darwen Town Hall, our Customer services advisors can provide general advice and can signpost visitors to the appropriate service.
We have the following facilities available in our town halls:
- Public access PCs
- Public access phones
We do not provide drop-in services so if you need to speak to someone, we would recommend that you contact the appropriate service first to see if you can make an appointment.