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inContact Saves the Day During Disastrous Flood

inContact Saves the Day During Disastrous Flood

March 11, 2013
By Amanda Ciccatelli, TMCnet Web Editor

2-1-1 @ IMPACT provides 24-hour central access for residents of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, in need of assistance with family, health and social services from community resource specialists who help assess caller situations. When a major flood hit the area, affecting 15,000 homes, 2-1-1 @ IMPACT used inContact’s portfolio of cloud-based contact center solutions to scale up from 70 ports to over 1,000 ports as call volume increased, triple its agents in just minutes, reduce queue times, call volumes and call backs through IVR scripting and recordings to handle call volumes, and ensure 24/7 availability.


On a normal day, 2-1-1 @ IMPACT receives 400 and 600 calls, but in July 2010, the storm caused over 1,300 calls in queue in just 12 hours to report on the damage people received from the flooding. This high number of incoming calls continued for about three weeks following.

If it hadn’t been for inContact, 2-1-1 @ IMPACT wouldn’t have been able to handle the volume of calls that came in.

“If it weren’t for inContact, we would have had a busy signal for about 36 hours or more,” said Jacki Bentilla, Information Technology Specialist at 2-1-1 @ IMPACT. “The first full day after the storm was crazy. It was, by far, the busiest we have ever been. Normally, we’re only allocated 500 ports, but when I kept calling inContact every 5 to 10 minutes to increase the ports, they just took over, monitored our traffic and gave us as many ports as we needed.”

Additionally, inContact made it easy for the call center to add more agents. Usually, about 12 agents field calls and respond to the needs of the county’s residents, but with so many calls coming in, they needed to triple their ranks almost immediately. So, they resorted to training staff to take calls and enlist the help of 24 volunteers, which would have been impossible with a more complex technology.

“We just set up the agent in the system, assigned their skills, and showed the people how to use it. It took just a few minutes per agent. It was great,” said Bentilla said.

With so many calls coming in to report on damage, many couldn’t get through on their first try. As a result, many callers took advantage of inContact’s automatic callback feature, eliminating customer holdtime by calling the customer back when they move to first place in the queue.

On the night of the flood, and for days after, the large number of calls required 2-1-1 @ IMPACT to take a different approach. Re-scripting its inContact IVR, they quickly turned off the callback feature and gave people the option to wait or go to a website to fill out a form to report flood damage. 2-1-1 @ IMPACT was also able to add several recordings that would allow waiting callers to get as much information as possible before talking to anyone.

The IVR was scripted to let those in the queue know how much longer they would have to wait as well, before talking to one of 2-1-1 @ IMPACT’s Community Resource Specialists.

“The IVR scripting in inContact is considerably quicker than what I had been used to in other systems,” Bentilla explained. “It was also a lot easier to add recordings. In the premises-based solution we had used previously, it would have taken two to three times as long to change or add recordings.”

In addition, inContact also had an effect on 2-1-1 @ IMPACT’s ability to handle the excessive call volume. Skills-based routing allowed 2-1-1 @ IMPACT to make sure volunteers and internal staff only handled flood calls, while normal 2-1-1 calls went to its trained Community Resource Specialists. The ability to set up at-home agents with inContact allowed 2-1-1 @ IMPACT to have some agents or supervisors log in and take calls from home to help out.

The real-time reporting gave 2-1-1 @ IMPACT insight on how rapidly calls were coming in, the need to increase its ports, and how to best respond to each situation.

“Without inContact, we wouldn’t have been able to respond as well as we did, and we certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it as easily,” Bentilla added. “We had an emergency situation and inContact was exceptionally responsive to our needs.”




Edited by Braden Becker



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