Three Public Safety Answering Point Challenges That Recording Tools Can Solve

On the road to Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1), public safety agencies are facing multifaceted challenges—from budgetary restrictions to heightened regulatory and citizen expectations.

Optimizing operations and using existing resources wisely is easy to say, but is it hard to do?

Well, it turns out that some tools can help you solve more challenges than you would initially expect. In this blog post, I’m going to share three examples of how a smart interaction-recording tool can support your daily operations.

1. Incident Reconstruction

The expansion of the internet has reshaped communication. According to Domo, the internet reaches 56.1% of the world’s population, and American users alone consume 4,416,720 GB of internet data every single minute (!) of the day. For public safety answering points (PSAPs), the growth in user-generated data and the development of new communication modes can be a challenge and an opportunity at the same time.

Enabling PSAPs to receive text and multimedia in addition to voice calls, and then to capture these interactions, securely archive them, and be able to retrieve all recordings on demand, requires crucial changes within the command center.

However, if public safety agencies can successfully address the new challenges of the digital era, they can benefit from having a greater amount of more accurate information at hand, which can transform emergency response and incident reconstruction.

The good news is that some recording applications designed for emergency response centers already have the capability to capture multi-channel interactions and replay the recordings (of each channel) simultaneously, on a single screen. Furthermore, some NG9-1-1 ready tools are enabling users to group all recordings tied to a specific incident and create easy-to-manage collections of data that can be stored and retrieved instantly when needed.

This feature can be particularly helpful for the reconstruction of complex events involving information captured across varying communication channels such as voice calls, text messages, photos, and video or CCTV recordings.

To see how Verint Insight Center can help you access data quickly and replay multi-channel recordings simultaneously, on a single screen, Learn More.

2. Quality Assurance

In recent years, public safety answering points have been challenged by the increasing workload for telecommunicators (TCs), the constant changes within response centers, rapid technology advances, evolving industry standards and heightened citizen expectations.

Yet, maintaining a high-quality emergency response service should know no compromise.

Add budgetary restrictions to the picture, and it is clear that emergency response centers should harness all the capabilities of their existing tools. A well-designed recording solution, for example, can help increase your efficiency and accuracy.

Here’s how:

• If your recorder supports metadata tagging, you can tie relevant information—such as computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data—to each recording. This facilitates easy retrieval and helps you have everything at your fingertips when needed.
• Being able to capture not only the interaction between the caller and the call taker, but also the corresponding activities on the telecommunicator’s desktop—such as keystrokes, screen navigation, and after-call wrap-up—can support further analysis, issue identification and reveal the successful behaviors of top performers.
• With the use of the right applications, accurately tagged recordings can also help you replace time consuming, manual processes with automation—so you can focus on more complex, higher-value tasks.

To learn how Verint can help you boost your operational efficiency and autoscore the vast majority of the interactions across all recorded E9-1-1 communications, read our datasheet.

3. Employee Training

As 911 services evolve, so does the public safety telecommunicator role. Although new technologies make providing emergency services more efficient, they also call for new skills and capabilities from call-takers.

Furthermore, attrition—often caused by burnout—is a well-known challenge for emergency dispatch centers (EDCs). According to a report published by the Portland Bureau of Emergency Communications in the United States, dispatcher turnover nationally averages 17% to 19%¹. Therefore, public safety agencies must do their best to create a rewarding and manageable work environment for their employees—starting with providing proper training to prepare them for the toughest situations.

Using real-life scenarios for educational purposes can help you create more engaging, accurate and credible courses. And, when it comes to performance reviews, a recording can help you acknowledge each employee’s achievements, as well as objectively highlight areas requiring improvement, by allowing them to listen to recordings of their own calls.

To learn how Verint can help you empower your telecommunicators to do their best, check out our datasheet.

In summary, a comprehensive recording solution can help you tackle many daily challenges beyond merely recording calls. Designed for emergency response, public safety, critical infrastructure and control room operations, Verint offers solutions that can help enhance emergency preparedness while increasing efficiency and mitigating risk.

Visit Solutions for Public Safety and Critical Infrastructure Operations to discover more.

¹ Matrix Consulting Group, April 2017