Increasing Citizen Loyalty with 311 Call Center Technology
1 Jul, 2007
By: Mariann McDonaghThe readily recognized, universal emergency telephone number is beyond a doubt 911. Used for critical and life-threatening emergencies, the 911 answer point infrastructure was built to quickly identify and route calls and dispatch emergency personnel. As 911 systems became overloaded with non-critical calls, cities began to see the need to create a new centralized infrastructure to handle non-emergency citizen inquires.
In 1997, the FCC officially approved the nationwide use of 311 for non-emergency calls. With metro areas as early adopters of this approach, the 311 infrastructure was initially designed to handle local government inquiries. The 311 number gives callers access a wide array of information, including parking and facility schedules, and can report non-emergency incidents, such as power outages.
Since the implementation of 311, various cities have realized significant call reduction at their 911 centers and have reduced stress on the emergency answer point infrastructure.
Who is Handling Your 311 Call?
Implemented at the local level, 311 calls may be routed to the same call center as 911 calls or handled by a separate call center run by the city. In systems where 911 and 311 are operated by the police department and housed under the same roof, life-threatening calls are always given the priority in queue. Calls to 311 are assigned secondary priority and answered only when no 911 calls are waiting. In the event of an influx of calls to the 911 center, the 311 infrastructure also has the flexibility to scale, provide additional call takers and help more effectively meet the demands of an emergency situation.
The second type of 311 call center is run by the city and handled separately from 911. In this model, calls are answered and logged into the city’s system and routed to the appropriate municipal department. In the event that an emergency call does come through the 311 system, information is entered into the city system and is immediately visible to the police department’s 911 center for the dispatch of emergency services. In some 311 centers, personnel may be additionally trained to take 911 calls.
311 At Your Service
Today’s 311 centers are experiencing a fundamental shift --- from a “compliance” mentality to one driven by “citizen service.” Traditionally, calls into the 911 center were recorded for regulatory and compliance reasons. State mandates are also driving the move toward improved quality, with some states mandating call audits on a certain number of incidents per month. For example, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency requires all 911 centers to select a random sample of two percent of calls and evaluate them for quality daily.
Organizations running 311 centers have similarly recognized the business value of call recording in ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction and increasing operational efficiencies. This awareness marks a significant shift from the attitude of recording because you have to, to recording because you want to.
The New Breed of 311 Call Center
Today’s 311 centers are taking call recording to the next level with advanced quality monitoring solutions to improve operations, response time and call-taker training. The 311 call center managers need to better understand the factors that impact quality, performance and customer satisfaction so they can reinforce positive agent behaviors and produce better outcomes.
“Callers to 311 contact centers are really looking for quick and courteous delivery of information on anything from municipal services to facility schedules,” said Frost & Sullivan Strategic Analyst Michael DeSalles. “Advanced contact center technologies such quality monitoring and speech analytics can be applied in 311 settings to significantly increase organizational efficiencies and optimize operations. This way, cities can really deliver exceptional customer service and better meet the unique needs of their citizen customers.”
Today’s intelligent recording solutions also allow managers and supervisors to monitor the quality of their operations on a daily basis and automate the entire quality management and evaluation process. While most 311 contact centers are focused on call-taker evaluation, some centers are taking this program one step further by conducting quality audits.
Call-taker evaluation typically involves answering questions about the call-taker’s behavior during a call. For example:
• Answered the phone quickly and correctly
• Determined the nature of the inquiry and assigned appropriate response
• Obtained call-back number from the caller.
A general quality audit goes beyond the basics and looks for trends and intelligence that may be impacting call-taker performance such as:
• Accomplished all data-capture steps quickly and effectively (within 60 seconds)
• Obtained all pertinent information and made updates accordingly
• Kept caller on the line until all required information was obtained
• Remained calm, efficient, engaged with caller and professional at all points during the call.
In addition, 311 centers can implement more advanced capabilities, such as screen recording. Screen recording allows all mouse movements and keystrokes to be efficiently captured without disrupting call-takers and are fully reproduced during playback. Managers and supervisors can use screen recording solutions to listen to calls and, at the same time, view the call-taker screens to ensure correct follow-up actions were taken. Screen recording is also becoming more widely used as the proliferation of cell phones has led to new incoming data such as text messages and photos sent from the scene of an incident. These screen records can then be used for additional evidence related to the incident.
Coming Soon to a 311 Center Near You
In the future, technologies that are currently deployed in commercial contact centers, such as analytics, will also be integrated into the 311 center to provide actionable intelligence to supervisors and managers. This actionable intelligence will enable deeper incident analysis and will allow managers and supervisors to get more from their repository of inquiries and better understand how their organization is operating. Armed with this information, they can enhance call-taker performance and maximize 311 center productivity.
Speech analytics and call categorization are two analytics applications that are increasingly gaining momentum in the commercial market due to the valuable insights they reveal. Speech analytics in particular can reveal key insights into the root cause of customer contacts. Advanced speech analytics solutions identify these root causes automatically, sorting through the entire context of thousands of conversations using, for example, emotion detection and word-search capabilities. Specifically, speech analytics could help 311 organizations:
• Determine why citizens call and why first call resolution opportunities may be missed
• Uncover which call-takers are out of compliance with scripting, dialog, etc., to help determine training needs
• Understand reasons for citizen dissatisfaction and perform other root cause analyses.
In addition, call categorization gives managers and supervisors the ability to classify large volumes of calls into specific categories based on call content. Calls are “listened to” and automatically placed into these categories based on content, and managers and supervisors have the ability to drill down into each category to listen to the most relevant calls that are taken in their 311 centers.
Utilizing best practices from the 911 systems and the commercial market, 311 centers have expanded beyond simple call recording to leverage benchmarking and evaluations to increase organizational efficiencies and optimize operations. Now, many 311 centers are implementing quality monitoring programs similar to those in use in the enterprise contact center market.
These new approaches to quality monitoring not only improve performance, they can lead to lower call-taker turnover and better public service. It won’t be long before all 311 contact centers are required to conduct some level of quality assurance monitoring. Those who take the initiative to set standards ahead of the curve will not only increase performance, but their call-takers will be better trained, leading to fewer errors, more satisfied staff and better service. As a result, the 311 platform can play an important role in municipal government, citizen relations and ushering in a new era of citizen satisfaction and loyalty.
