Municipal Call Centers Rely on Technology to Ease Heavy Call Volumes During COVID

Municipal call centers have been under increased strain throughout the coronavirus pandemic, with many large cities offering new services and support to residents. As a result, call centers have had to become more agile and adaptable to meet a changing set of needs.

One of the biggest burdens taken on by municipal call centers since the advent of COVID-19 is the booking of vaccine appointments. This has been compounded by providing additional new services like COVID hotlines and handling queries about financial and employment assistance.

In New Orleans, municipal officials decided to use technology to integrate vaccine appointment bookings with their existing 311 call center platform. The system enables users to enter their eligibility information for vaccines as well as register for an appointment if available. If appointments are booked up, the city will send registration links to callers based on their zip codes so they may schedule for a later date. New Orleans also intends to target areas with high infection rates and low vaccination rates.

The result of this integration was a 24-hour hotline and massive increases in call volume. New Orleans met those demands via a new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that automates some generic service requests, so the system won't get bogged down.

In Buffalo, NY, officials transitioned 311 call center staff members to remote work seamlessly in less than a week so communications services would not be interrupted. Maryland was able to expand its GoVAX call center during the pandemic, enabling agents to schedule more than 460,000 vaccine appointments and more than 5,000 vaccine referrals for homebound residents.

Dallas County, Texas was forced to switch vaccine management software after a month because its initial system required too much physical paperwork for recording and tracking vaccinations. The county is now using vaccine management software from Luminare, which enables officials to track all registrations, assign residents to vaccination sites for appointments, collect data on vaccines administered, and report data to the state -- all without paper. The system is credited with helping Dallas County keep up with a massive demand for vaccinations.

According to Dr. Phil Huang, director of the county's Department of Health and Human Services, the system was instrumental early in the vaccine rollout stage with helping prioritize vaccination groups, and then finding people who had preregistered from those groups. It then automatically sent out invitations to those individuals to schedule vaccine appointments.

Edited by Luke Bellos