Behind the Scenes of 911 Quality Assurance

Unveiling the hidden potential of Automated Quality Management technologies

In an emergency, Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) serve as the first line of defense. They connect citizens to the appropriate emergency services. 911 Quality Assurance (QA) is vital for ensuring the accuracy and highest standard of call handling, even in times of distress.

At the same time, many PSAPs are under increased pressure due to high employee turnover, budgetary constraints, and a growing number of communication channels they have to manage. Casey Rives, Solutions Consultant at Verint, has over ten years of experience as a 911 telecommunicator and call taker trainer. I asked her about how PSAPs can achieve 911 quality assurance and quality improvement efficiently while dealing with everyday challenges.

Get our expert’s view on how automated quality management technologies can help PSAPs:

• boost efficiency
• fight the staffing crisis
• reduce liability

Reka Sarudi (R.S.): What does quality assurance typically look like in a PSAP and who’s responsible for it? Is it mandatory for all 911 centers to have quality standards in place?

Casey Rives (C.R.): Who does 911 quality assurance has changed over the last few years.

A larger center typically would have a designated Quality Manager or 911 Quality Assurance personnel. But, with the staffing crisis in recent years, even the biggest PSAPs are struggling with having positions solely focusing on quality assurance.

So, that’s why automated quality management (AQM) is becoming more and more important.

NENA (National Emergency Number Association) and APCO (Association of Public Safety Communications Officials) only started implementing 911 quality assurance standards around 2015. These are still recommendations rather than completely mandatory expectations. However, every PSAP has protocols, practices, and specific criteria, and they monitor and score a certain number of interactions to achieve quality assurance and improvement. This varies by the organization.

For instance, I worked in a large center and each supervisor had to review three to five calls of each employee per month, which isn’t a lot—but this is what our bandwidth and our traditional, manual interaction sampling techniques allowed us to complete accurately at that time.

The key benefits of AQM

R.S.: Can PSAPs increase the volume of interactions reviewed without increasing the number of staff?

C.R.: Definitely. AQM technologies have been available for a while to help you evaluate a larger variety and number of interactions—and score up to 100% of the interactions handled by your PSAP. But coaching staff members and monitoring their performance is equally as important as reviewing all of your interactions. By reinforcing coaching, you’re promoting compliance and consistency within your agency, reducing liability—which is paramount to quality assurance in 911.

R.S.: Besides the sheer volume of interactions evaluated, can automation change other aspects of 911 quality assurance?

C.R.: By implementing AQM technologies, PSAPs can have more objective, consistent performance reviews. Although interaction sampling should be random at all times, in practice agencies tend to focus on interactions where something happened. For instance, the call taker entered the wrong location and then the fire or police dispatcher had to change it, thus delaying the service.

I believe that a great QA program should not only highlight the poor calls but reinforce positive interactions to let call takers and dispatchers know that they’re doing a great job—especially with the morale and pressure existing at current centers.

Furthermore, automation can help you to pick a good variety of interactions to review. Let’s see an example.

By setting the parameters, instead of reviewing for example five medical calls, you can select a pre-defined mixture of medical, police and fire calls to evaluate, which helps you get new perspectives for assessment.

How AQM works in practice

R.S.: What happens when a supervisor spots a quality issue?

C.R.: Usually they would invite the staff member to a one-on-one discussion to go over the call and discuss it. Depending on the severity of the error, they can assign individual training. But no one likes to be pulled into a room to be told what they’ve done wrong.

What I like in modern QA tools, including Verint AI-powered Automated Quality Management for Public Safety, is that before scheduling a discussion, you can send that feedback to the employee directly through the solution itself, so it doesn’t seem as reprimanding.

This way the call taker can prepare for the feedback session. They have time to review and listen to the call and be proactive in the coaching process. As opposed to manual review processes, modern QA technologies enable 911 agencies to have the data, the resources, and the single source of truth favor both managers and employees.

Quality improvement strategies for PSAPs

R.S.: Do you think that a PSAP’s quality program can affect employee engagement?

C.R.: Absolutely, and I recommend highlighting the positive interactions as well. Another advantage of using AQM is that you can see the overall performance of an employee instead of focusing on a random interaction.

Sometimes a person had four great calls and one that did not go as well as expected. Without reviewing all of their interactions, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to tell this.

Providing praise along with constructive feedback can increase employee engagement, which can also help with some of the staffing crisis the public safety sector is currently seeing.

R.S.: What would you recommend to a PSAP that is considering implementing AQM?

C.R.: Look at it as a long-term investment that can help enhance interaction handling, reduce liability, allocate staff more effectively, and increase employee satisfaction. I know that any change in a response center can be challenging, but implanting AQM doesn’t have to happen overnight.

You can introduce AQM gradually, starting off with simple automated scoring rules such as checking if the 911 personnel captured the caller’s location correctly. In the next step, you can finetune these rules and introduce new ones to gather more data. And last but not least, keep in mind the benefits of consistent quality assurance to efficiently define training priorities and identify gaps in your QA program.

AQM helps you measure the training that you’ve provided to your call takers and dispatchers, which is a priority in light of high turnover rates. By monitoring the performance of new personnel and senior staff members, you can also reduce liability, mitigating the risk of overseeing a call taker continually making a mistake that delays response, or worse: causes life-or-death situations.

R.S.: How does Verint help 911 response centers address their quality assurance challenges?

C.R.: Verint AI-Powered Automated Quality Management is a powerful tool to monitor and autoscore up to 100% of your interactions across all communication channels, including phone calls, radio communications, text-to-911 and more. Verint Quality Bot uses the power of AI to expand call taker capacity and boost performance, along with improving QA and reducing costs.

What I particularly like about our product is that, as I mentioned before, you can email your feedback directly to the call taker. You can also create shared inboxes, sharing the workflow with other supervisors depending on how your agency is organized.

Another benefit of the solution: it’s easily customizable and it offers flexibility. You’re not limited to a specific form—you can set up your own rules depending on the standard operating procedures your organization has.

Discover Verint Automated Quality Management for Public Safety

To learn more about Verint Automated Quality Management for Public Safety, visit verint.com/public-safety and schedule a demo with Casey by filling in the form at the bottom of the page. To discover other technological advancements that can help you enhance your emergency call handling, read The Future of Emergency Response ebook.