Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Emergency Call Centers Struggle to Find Personnel
In the contact center, scheduling often seems like an abstract concept. It’s a spreadsheet of people, shifts and call queues. When schedules go awry and adherence is off, it’s a warning message to the call center manager. It might translate into irritated customers and calls from the executive office. In the emergency dispatch business, however, it translates to life and death.
In Bozeman, Montana, police and fire unions recently sent a letter to Gallatin County Administrator Jim Doar expressing distress that the quality of work being turned in by the dispatch call center isn't up to par for the work being done outside. Staffing shortages and inexperience in the call center are leading to longer response times.
“According the National Fire Protection Association, first responders should be notified of a high-priority emergency within 60 seconds, 90 percent of the time,” wrote NBC Montana’s Deion Broxton. “The Bozeman fire union reports in the letter that of the more than 600 calls they've responded to this year, only 129 calls met that standard.”
The shortages and lack of coordination were particularly horrifying in the 2017 case of a teenager in Ohio who suffocated in his minivan when emergency responders failed to find him. The young man, who had been pinned by seats in the van, used voice commands to dial 911 and attempted to tell the dispatcher his location and that he was suffocating. The operator could not understand him and lacked the proper information to find the van. Investigations after-the-fact determined that a lack of training and technology led to the young man’s death.
Across the country, emergency contact centers report being chronically underfunded and understaffed, in part because of low unemployment rates. Call volumes are way up because of the proliferation of cell phones.
“In any environment where you have increasing competition for workers, a worker is going to have more choices,” Christopher Carver, operations director of 911 centers for the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), told USA Today. “People want to work in places they like. 911 centers can be challenging places to work.”
To attract more candidates, many municipalities have raised the starting salaries of dispatchers in the call center. But it appears that few people are willing to take on the kind of pressure and responsibility that comes with working in a 911 call center.
Edited by Maurice Nagle