Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
911 Call Centers Turning to AI to Handle Influx of Calls Amid Staffing Shortages
The pandemic has caused staffing shortages in all markets, and government call centers are no exception. 911 emergency centers have faced a double whammy of an increase in calls and not enough agents to handle them, and many are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to pick up the slack.
Government call centers in Texas, Oregon and California turned to AI to deal with an influx of calls and connect residents to the services they need. The police department in Austin, TX, for instance, has been dealing with a staffing shortage since 2019. The situation worsened throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and the city now has 50 vacancies and is operating at only 70 percent capacity. Austin receives more than a million 911 calls each year.
Non-emergency calls, known as 311 calls, are managed by Austin Energy (News - Alert) but often require action from the police department. According to Lt. Kenneth Murphy, the department had a queue of more than 13,000 customer service requests requiring a callback as of last month.
The department is now looking at AI to enable residents to make their requests via an app, a website or through the phone. Voice requests would be handled by a "virtual officer," enabling AI to record basic information and details about the caller's needs. AI could also be used to transcribe and translate non-English speaking queries. The city has a large population of Vietnamese, Chinese and Hindi speakers, making translation services a key benefit of AI tools. According to Murphy, while human officers would still ultimately handle the requests, AI would reduce the amount of staff time necessary and help officers resolve issues more quickly and efficiently.
The Bureau of Emergency Communications in Portland, OR already plans to implement Versaterm's Case Service by July and will beta test the solution throughout the rest of the year. According to Bob Cozzie, 911 director for the city, the bureau will determine whether it will continue to use the solution after the testing period.
Cozzie said the solution would potentially be used as the first point of contact for non-emergency calls. Agents currently answer both emergency and non-emergency calls, resulting in heavy workloads. Portland data showed a 43-percent increase in 911 calls this year over a seven-day period compared to the same period in 2019.
The city is hoping AI will become part of its newly established 311 program for handling all non-emergency calls. The solution would directly answer some questions and transfer callers to human agents when needed. Other benefits would be the ability to process and translate data from non-English speakers.
San Jose, CA has already implemented AI to address its own call center challenges. Non-emergency calls are routed to a Customer Contact Center, which uses Google (News - Alert)'s Dialogflow AI-based virtual agent. The solution sorts incoming calls and routes them to the proper channel, freeing up overburdened human agents to handle more complex requests.
AI is being used to answer simple requests, like scheduling trash and junk removal, which can all be done through the system. San Jose was also drawn to AI because of its language translation benefits. Real-time translation is now available in two languages with the possibility of more languages being added in the future, according to Arti Tangri, a data architect with the San Jose IT department.
Edited by Luke Bellos