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9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal

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Re: 9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal

#11

Post by tetha »

"Dear mugger/murderer/rapist, would thee please be so kind to delay your desired actions by a mere 20 minutes, while I try to communicate with 911? Certainly, you would agree that it is not a gentlemans way to abuse this misbehaviour of the emergency call. May I offer you a cup of tea while we wait for the call to go through?"

In all seriousness, if there is an emergency hotline and you need around 5 - 10 minutes to get the call actually through there, that is just not acceptable in several situations. and I am not even talking about 20 minutes or half an hour. Half an hour is an eternity with regard to emergencies.

Re: 9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal

#12

Post by alexgartrell »

mediaman wrote: post #4

Isn't this a major opportunity for a centralized, scaled outsource provider to deliver 911 service to municipalities who sign up for it at a lower cost and better rate of service than would otherwise be possible? Imagine an advanced call center with 500 employees. The center can afford sophisticated technology such as geographic point identification of the call, bucketing multiple calls about the same incident, maybe…

The approach being used more recently by at least one software provider I know about is to link all of the call centers in a geographic region together. Extra calls in one municipality get sent to another where people can handle it.

Outsourcing is a bad idea, because "we're at the walmart by the high school" is significantly easier for locals to understand than it would be for someone in "an advanced call center". I know that, ideally, the technology would be good enough that the person doesn't have to say where they are, but that isn't the reality at the moment

Re: 9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal

#17

Post by derefr »

I think the simplest way to fix this particular problem would be to just direct to a "recording buffer"--like voicemail, but an operator can come in at any time when there's one available. There will have to be voice recognition so they have a screen of what you've said so far; if they had to actually listen to the buffer, they couldn't listen to you. However, if the line has since gone dead, or you're just babbling incoherently or something similar, they should be able to listen to the start of the buffer (while still having you on in the other ear.)

On reflection, though, this probably isn't possible; if voice recognition could understand these people to any degree, there would already be priority-triggers based on certain keywords (fire, seizure, etc.) and I'm sure these haven't yet popped up. What could work is if you had a pair of operators for each caller--one who comes in on the call-in-progress, and the other who listens to the buffer and tells the first (or types into a shared display) any additional information they need to know. The buffer operator could then go on to another call, though perhaps having two available operators for each call might help reduce mistakes. :)

Re: 9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal

#18

Post by hahadenny »

fallentimes wrote: post #3
tlrobinson wrote: post #2

Indeed, I witnessed a car accident a few days ago, and called 911. Sure enough, I got a busy signal. My first thought is that you should be put on hold rather than given a busy signal, but I wonder if the busy signal helps filter out some of the non-emergency calls.

Bringing up the non-emergency calls is a really good point. Abuse/misuse of 911 is a huge and serious problem: http://www.popcenter.org/problems/911_abuse/

yes

Re: 9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal

#19

Post by Retric »

sachinag wrote: post #5
mediaman wrote: post #4

Isn't this a major opportunity for a centralized, scaled outsource provider to deliver 911 service to municipalities who sign up for it at a lower cost and better rate of service than would otherwise be possible? Imagine an advanced call center with 500 employees. The center can afford sophisticated technology such as geographic point identification of the call, bucketing multiple calls about the same incident, maybe…

You really don't want people in a large call center out in the middle of nowhere who are unaware of local landmarks and surroundings answering 9-1-1 calls. It's a huge public safety issue where you're dealing with distraught people and the operator has to make sense of various small bits of information quickly.

That's an important issue.

I would suggest having a backup to a large call center if the wait time is over 30 seconds. The remote call center could have priority to "escalate" to the local call center and share information. Integrating it so the local call center could see what the remote site had typed and replay the message if the caller stops responding would also improve that system.

Set things up as a distributed system so each site would accept incoming calls if they had excess capacity and give remote sites access to local conditions. So you can handle large sudden spikes without excessive staff.

The other option would be to try automatically handle some calls using location information while the caller is waiting. (If you are calling about the car crash at _ we are sending an ambulance. If you need further assistance please stay on the line.)

Re: 9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal

#20

Post by moe »

mediaman wrote: post #4

Isn't this a major opportunity for a centralized, scaled outsource provider to deliver 911 service to municipalities who sign up for it at a lower cost and better rate of service than would otherwise be possible? Imagine an advanced call center with 500 employees. The center can afford sophisticated technology such as geographic point identification of the call, bucketing multiple calls about the same incident, maybe…

"Dear Sir, this Paul from Emergency Center. Your call be very important to us, glad you took the time to contact. Please how may I turn this into win-win situation for both?"

"I'm bleeding arrr horrible accident arrr"

"Dear Sir, thank you for detail. Looking for best local service, one moment please, sir (...music...) Thank you for your patience, sir. Your request is important to us and will forward to local (reading) veee-teeerinaaa-ry asap. Sir, while you wait would you like to hear about other interesting products?"

"Aaarrh leg... armm... detached... arrrh"

"Dear Sir, glad you are taking the time. I will now forward call to Susan who will have many information about interesting product. Thank very much for calling 911-Advantage Sir."

"Uarghhh fire... children... uuuuah"

chrrrp "Good evening Sir, this is Susan from 911-Advantage. Glad you are interested in our products. Sir, may I ask if you have insurance?"

"Muuuh, cows... trampling... fire.. blaargh"

"That is so great to hear, Sir. Did you hear about our brand new Dental-Deluxe package for singles?"

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