Would you recommend Vonage ?

"Warren" wrote in news:vYydnYl0zphoGUbYnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:

I called my local police department, and the person there gave me a non- emergency number to call at the county E911 call center. I called that and asked her. Since it was on a Monday with no emergency in progress, I was oked to do so. I've already posted the results.

I live in a rural county where not much can happen for days. Some days there are no emergency runs at all. I'm sure that your personnel management isn't suggesting that E911 shouldn't be manned at all during that time.

OTOH, many large cities and urban areas couldn't handle the huge influx of E911 testers. The sad part is that E911 is sometimes placed in service without proper testing, and the emergency services get directed to respond to a site many miles away from the actual emergency resulting in loss of life or property.

"Gary" wrote in news:9HsCh.3163$2w.2553@trndny09:

I've had a situation during the meltdown of First Energy's power grid a few years ago and vast areas of the NE US had no power. At that time, I had Verizon pots and TW RoadRunner broadband service. Power came back up for much of our area within an hour or so. I could get back on RoadRunner within minutes of the power returning, but Verizon pots was dead for another 12 hours. So much for POTS backup for E911.

I do/did have a UPS but power must be supplied to the cable network, at the (in this area) green boxes located at various locations. If the one that serves your small sector has power or the batteries are charged(typical here is for 2 hours backup), one should be able to connect to the internet with power from a UPS.

Many emergency call centers can and do support "test" calls, as they know that the E911 databases aren't perfect. As another poster already said, a good call center wants to make sure the database is accurate.

An excellent way to find out if test calls are okay in your locality is to call the administrative number for the call center or the non-emergency police number. In many cases, some time with Google will reveal the right contacts.

I did this a while ago when Vonage rolled out E911 in my area, and was approved for a test call that revealed Vonage had screwed up my data. The call center database administrator worked with her database provider to push back on Vonage, while I worked through customer support. The end result is my data was fixed and a problem was identified with Vonage's data for locations where the post office name doesn't match the emergency services municipality name. I'm not sure if Vonage has fixed this for others with this not-uncommon situation, but by flagging it though my local E911 center I've made sure the right people know about it.

-Gary

Warren I see we are just going to have to disagree here. I worked in a City that had over 100,000 people. I have been to areas that have over

400 square miles, I have been to Cities that have well over a million people, they ALL operated exactly the same way. Not a one had a plan that put fewer dispatchers on duty during any percieved "slack time". There were ALWAYS plans though to be able to "call back" more dispatchers, if the problems overwhelmed the standard on duty shift. And not a one had any problems with someone calling and saying "I am testing my 911, can you tell me what it says on your screen?" Now not all of those calls were handled immediately, sometimes the caller was put on hold and then the dispatcher handled an emergency and then got back to the person on the phone. I NEVER saw one dispatcher get angry or mad at that type of call. I have seen PLENTY of dispatchers get mad and angry and people that call and call and call over things that should not be 911 calls. NO dispatcher ever let the Public know that they were mad or angry though. I have PERSONALLY made over a dozen of these types of call, and was always helped in a very professional manner. I have found some addresses that had problems, that were fixed by the phone company, and most that were okay. As I said you mileage may vary, but that is what I saw!

That's very interesting.

Such a waste. Did they schedule police officers the same way? Just as many on during slow periods as busy periods? Or was such lazy, wasteful scheduling only in the call center?

Good, reliable workforce management software for call centers has been available for over a decade, and there are not any private sector call center I know of that doesn't do so. But then again, if they waste money, it comes out of the bottom line. If your experience is common for publicly funded call centers, then it is a very sorry testament for how our tax dollars are wasted.

Now if we're talking about a call center that has only one person answering the phone, of course workforce management software isn't going to help. But as the call centers get bigger, and in my state, state law (backed by state funding) strongly encourages only one 911 call center per county, so in the counties with large urban population, there can be anywhere from 5 to 25 operators on duty at any given time -- depending upon the shift.

Do the math. How much would it cost to always have 25 operators on duty when call volume on that shift never indicates a need for more than 5 operators on duty. How much money is that a week? How much for a year? How can a call center manager justify NOT using workforce management software? And these call centers certainly must have ACD switches that can provide more than enough historic data to get the best results from workforce management software. Set the parameters for a 100% service level with zero wait time, and it's still going to come out with a more economical scheduling model than just staffing the same way all the time, and perhaps cut the call center's required budget by 25-50%. And that doesn't count the savings in training by right-staffing instead of over-staffing the center. That money could go towards better things, like more officers on the street (at the times they're needed.)

This is elementary call center management theory. It's not some new-fangled, untested idea. It's the way private sector call centers HAVE to operate (because they don't have an endless stream of taxpayer money.) And in a big city, the effect is going to be well into six - maybe even seven - figures a year. Taxpayers should be outraged if this basic way of managing labor costs is not employed in their area.

How about the public? If a real medical emergency happens & the person cannot get thru because of some "line testing calls to 911" and then the person either dies because the 911 was busy, the 911 operators wouldn't care since they wouldn't know what happened.

The 911 line tester also wouldn't care since the person's death is not their concern nor would the 911-line-tester acknowledge they created problems.

I would think the operators would know if calls are pending or not (really dumb if not so) and speed up/hang up any calls that felt were non-emergency calls. But there is a point to be made for not wanting test calls - esp. in peak hours - I'm just not sure the volume would be that troublesome. You would have to know how much time operators are spending actually taking calls vs waiting for them to come in.

"Warren" wrote in news:3IadnRTInLCe3kPYnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:

But then, private sector call centers keep people on hold until a live person is available to talk to them. In a life threatening emergency, the person in need could easily be dead after being on hold for even a short time.

guest wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@crane.li-po.edu:

911 numbers are much like the dial-up ISP numbers. There have to be several callers before the actual allocated connections are all busy. The 911 operator can scan the board and see if the entire allocation is nearing it's capacity and end to call to the testor befor that happens.

Could you PLEASE change the subjectline when you stray so FUCKING far off the original thread?!?

I'm coming to this a bit late but 911 most likely works like other T1/PRI circuits into the call center. One wire, multiple circuits. The phone console queues up the calls. And unless it is very poorly designed many many many calls can be queued before anyone gets a busy. And even then I'd bet they roll over to somewhere else.

As to calling to verify 911, this is standard practice for many reason, many of them by law. In NC you can't open a pool unless the inspector calls 911 for an address check to show that someone calling 911 in a panic who doesn't know the address of the pool can still get help. It's expected by the 911 centers.

That's because they choose what service level they want to provide.

The baseline for tech support is 80% answered within 4 minutes, with 80% of the half-hours being within service level. But the company may want a premium support line to be 90% within 2 minutes, and 90% of the half-hours being within service level. Change those parameters, and the staffing requirements change, and thus the schedules that workforce management spits-out will be different.

For a 911 call center, you might want to specify 100% within 30 seconds, and 100% of half-hours being within service level. You'll end up with schedules very different from what you'd get in a tech support call center, but you'd still get schedules that provide different staffing levels for different times of the day. And those schedules would save a lot of money compared to always staffing as if the whole day is as bad as the worst time of the day.

Staffing a large 911 call center with the same number of people all the time wastes money. Tax money. Money that could go towards more pressing issues, like more police officers so they can raise their service levels. Money spent on 911 operators who are consistently sitting around during predictably slower times (and yes, with historic data you can predict call volume fairly accurately) are being paid money that could be spent on something that actually enhances public safety. Unless the attitude is that the taxpayers are an endless font of money, and that there's no need to be efficient.

And I simply can't believe that this lack of efficiency is the way all 911 call centers work. I still have faith that there are call center managers out there who actually know how to do their jobs, and at least make an attempt to staff effectively and efficiently. I can't believe that the norm is for these call centers to be run by armatures who put our safety at risk by wasting money on ineffective and inefficient staffing models. Civil service can't possibly be in that bad of shape.

Could you PLEASE change the subjectline when you stray so FUCKING far off the original thread?!?

Could you PLEASE change the subjectline when you stray so FUCKING far off the original thread?!?

Just ignore this subject, why are you being such a pain in the butt? It's not like you are being forced to read the subject!

Exactly why Warren's plan will not work. Tell me exactly how you plan for the Tornado that pops up today at 3 pm? How about the Hurricane? And do not even say well we will just schedule more people today because the chance is there but tomorrow we will not schedule them! We are talking tax payer paid people, not private sector employees that you can schedule or not schedule as you and your whim dictates. We are talking Government Employees, not some call center making illegal calls!! Or worse some place in India that has no clue what is going on where you and could care less. We are talking people that MUST answer a 911 line or PEOPLE DIE!!! When you call a 911 line and get put on hold, call Warren and blame him. His "schedule" did not account for your problem today, sorry about that! We are talking a 911 call center, MUST ANSWER lines, and people dying within 4 to 6 minutes of their heart attack, house fire, etc. if no one gets there in time!! We are talking the "golden hour" of time that people have between a serious auto accident and that same person being in the ER, or they DIE!!! We are not talking 80% within 2 minutes! We are talking ALL lines within 10 to 15 SECONDS!!! Less time if possible. All lines have the ability to be put on hold, no lines have the possibility to just ring and ring waiting for someone to answer them! Some call centers have 15 lines, the 100,000 population city has

10 lines! How many people would you schedule to answer those lines? Tell that number to the parents of the kid you didn't get to and died because Warren scheduled you off today because it is not a predicted "peak call volume time"! Ludicrous, just ludicrous!

I worked in a military Command Center for 16 years, the military's equivalent of a 911 call center. This was back in the late 80's thru the 90's so we didn't have fancy software, but we manually organized things just as Warren suggested and it worked very well. We staffed for the likely scenario, not for the 'what if' scenario. Before being certified to man the phones, we were trained to prioritize the incoming calls so as to handle the most urgent things first and to multitask heavily. Nearly everything was checklist-driven to ensure that the right people were engaged to address the situation and that the right steps were taken, in the right order, to put a situation to bed quickly and correctly. Every incident was logged and reviewed after the fact to see if we could have done better or to update the checklists, etc.

Sometimes we were busy as hell, but no one died while being on hold.

I don't think so, but mine is just one opinion.

Oh, please don't try to tell me that any 911 call center is always staffed as if a hurricane is coming. If that's true, then every hour of every day when there's not a hurricane would be slack-time, and there would be no problem with people calling 911 for non-emergency issues.

That's just too wacko to even consider.

You are absolutely correct, Bill.

Workforce management software creates responsible, efficient and effective scheduling based on desired parameters, but the concept behind the way the software works is based in responsible management techniques.

Excusing irresponsible scheduling techniques may have been easier to stomach in the days before reliable workforce management software was available for a reasonable cost. It takes some effort to do it manually. But then again, if funds are not limitless, doing it to some extent is necessary. Good workforce management software would have helped smooth-out some of the typical peaks and slack-times that you experienced.

But imagine what it would have been like without responsible scheduling techniques. And imagine how silly it would have been to sit around doing nothing most of the time because someone decided to always staff for the worst imaginable "what it" situation. And imagine how the money spent to staff that way could have been put to much better uses to ensure safety.

The police department isn't staffed to handle the worst "what if" situation. Hospital emergency rooms aren't always staffed for the worst "what if" situation. Nothing is staffed that way. With limited funds available, you staff for the expected conditions, and those conditions change based on things like time of day, day of week, month of the year, and other time-based factors.

Yes, it's probably easy to scare people to staff certain factions inefficiently. A recent "King of the Hill" episode where animal control was able to strong-arm unnecessary funds from the taxpayers by leveraging a worst-case scenario comes to mind. But even tax dollars are limited, and if we're staffing the 911 center inefficiently, that's taking money away from the police and fire departments to pay for people to sit around as if a worst-case scenario is always just around the corner.

News flash: You can call people in to work double-shifts (or even triple-shifts) when that worst-case scenario happens. You don't have to hire two or three times as many people as you normally need just to have them always sitting around ready to go, but mostly doing nothing. Using good workforce management techniques doesn't preclude you from making intraday adjustments as necessary.

Expecting that staff will be deployed based on need, and not just spread-out evenly is not some far-out concept. It's what should be expected of any manager responsible for scheduling any staff. That we're talking about a 911 call center only means that we expect a higher service level. It doesn't mean that efficient and effective management concepts can be ignored. If anything, our safety is enhanced when good workforce management techniques are used in staffing decisions.