Pennsylvania County Uses Speech Analytics to Improve 911 Call-Taking Procedures

By: Elaine Rundle on September 28, 2009

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Officials in Chester County, Pa., knew that both residents and call-takers were frustrated with the county’s 911 call-taking procedures. But they had no way of identifying exactly which questions were upsetting people the most.

That's when Verint Systems showed up and pitched its Impact 360 Workforce Management software and speech analytics features. County officials allowed Verint demonstrate the software using the city’s 911 call records and found answers to some of the questions they were asking.

As a result of what they found during the demonstration, officials implemented a new location verification process that has quelled the frustration and the county hopes to purchase the software next year.

Speech analytics uses technology called audio mining in which large volumes of audio files can be searched for specific words or phrases. According to information from Verint, “the solution recognizes words within this large volume of unstructured information and organizes them into user-created and self-suggesting categories.”

Bobby Kagel, assistant director of quality for the county’s Department of Emergency Services, said when the county rolled out its 911 procedures about 15 years ago, the street data was unreliable and there was a 50 to 60 percent error rate in the data that was being delivered for 911 purposes. “We ended up having a fire death as a result of a variety of reasons, but the root cause was the fact that we had two streets identically named with identical block ranges in the same town within the same municipality,” Kagel said.

To combat the problem, the county implemented verification procedures into its 911 call-taking process and updated its data to ensure accuracy. Kagel said for each 911 call, callers were asked to state what address they were calling from, the cross streets, the municipality of the location, and their phone number. However, this created frustration for callers who were reporting an emergency or problem from the local mall or were driving down the Pennsylvania Turnpike and didn’t know what cross street to give the call-takers.

The county’s call-takers were also getting frustrated because they knew the call center’s data was now accurate, but there were procedural compliance issues requiring a list of questions for call-takers to ask. The battery of questions frustrated the callers reporting an emergency.

Kagel said he knew anecdotally that there were problems with the process, but he needed reliable data before knowing how to improve the process. Verint used the speech analytics technology to identify when the questions were asked during a call, so county officials could spot changes and influxes to the emergency calls after the procedural questions were asked. “As a result on Sept. 8 we implemented a new location verification process that seems to be going fabulously and callers aren’t frustrated and telecommunicators aren’t frustrated,” Kagel said.

Chester County has not purchased the software yet, but hopes to once it’s approved in the 2010 budget. Kagel is ready to implement the software Jan. 1, but is already counting on one barrier to installation: the county’s disparate systems.

[Photo courtesy of Jason Pack/FEMA News Photo.]

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http://www.emergencymgmt.com/disaster/Chester-County-Speech-Analytics-911.html

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