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On August 19th, Fairfax County 911 announced that they’d executed their first live tests of a new solution to handle and triage non-emergency calls.
The solution? Prepared.
“Staffing used to be the biggest challenge but I think our non-emergency calls are the biggest challenge of our generation now,” said Director Scott Brillman at Prepared’s New HorAIzons Directors Roundtable event.
“We hire men and women to be lifesavers, we train them to be critical thinkers, and, when they get on the floor now to take calls, they’re handling emergency calls but they’re handling tons of non-emergency calls.
“Our hold times are our number one complaint for non-emergency calls and we’re working with Prepared to try and tackle that.”
Speaking to WUSA9, the Washington, D.C. affiliate of CBS, Assistant Director of Operations Dru Clarke added to the enthusiasm and spoke to the real need that the platform is addressing.
"We get 3,000 calls a day and approximately 60% of those calls are non-emergency calls for service…[community members] call and say, 'I need a police report from three weeks ago, where can I get that from?' or car seat installations, so we get the full gamut of just information only…we thought, well, these don't really require a person to triage them.
He notes that there are benefits for both the community and the agency’s 911 professionals.
For their team: "[Our staff] have a time to breathe in between calls because the AI agent is triaging calls that they really shouldn't be getting in the first place.”
For their community, in addition to faster, more effective service with lower, or eliminated, wait times: “We wanted something that's relaxed, something that's conversational, something that can build as the person builds their story in context…If at any point your non-emergency becomes an emergency, it will recognize that and transfer you [to a human call-taker] automatically.”
Ultimately, according to Brillman, this is an effort to ensure that members of the Fairfax Community get the help they need when they need it most.
“We really need to get back to focusing on these crises and emergencies; these minutes and seconds count.”
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