MACC 911 | Refocusing on priorities by automating non-emergency calls

Our industry has always been plagued by high turnover, burnout and lack of staffing. We have a choice - the PSAP can evolve and learn to thrive in the 21st century, or it can wither and die. — Gerrit Klein, Technical Services Manager MACC 911

MACC 911 — the unified dispatch center for Grant County, WA — has been exploring ways to reduce non-emergency call volume for over a year by pushing online reporting and hiring implementers to build an Amazon Connect-powered IVR.

Like nearly all PSAPs, they were struggling with approximately 60% of their total call volume being spent on non-emergency calls. It was unsustainable.

D.T. Donaldson, the Director of MACC 911, and Gerrit Klein, the Technical Services Manager, had an ambitious vision: to entirely automate their non-emergency calls.

To do that, we worked together to build an AI-powered call-taker that understands the callers’ needs and then:

1. Routes them to the right department, provides online resources, and answers basic questions
2. Triages for emergency situations or those requiring emergency telecommunicator assistance
3. Collects information for CAD incident reports, like noise complaints, harassments, and robberies

The sound of silence

Usually when go-live / cutover of new technology happens, you feel it – it’s controlled chaos. But with Aurelian, it's the opposite. It’s silence; the calls just stop ringing.

It’s the largest change within ECCs since the advent of CAD. In a moment, we reduced their total call volume by ~50% and their non-emergency call volume by ~75%.

Instead of answering admin calls, emergency telecommunicators review them (the fraction creating a call for service) and the rest are automatically resolved by our AI with zero human intervention.

For the emergency telecommunicators, it turned 3+ minute calls into 30 seconds of review and made their work entirely asynchronous. They review non-emergency requests when it makes sense for them.

In the first two months, we automated ~15,000 calls that created ~7,000 calls for service. Only 20% of those 15,000 callers ever spoke to a human and for situations an AI shouldn’t handle: domestic violence, sexual assault, in-progress crimes, etc. The rest were entirely handled by Aurelian.

I did not think [Aurelian] would be useful at all, did not think it would be good customer service, however, it seems we can more easily meet the demands of the callers without having to constantly be on the phone, thereby giving better customer service to our user agencies. — MACC 911, Emergency Telecommunicator

Prioritizing caller experience

[It surprised me] how easy it is to use from the caller side, (Aurelian) talks and acts like a real person. — MACC 911, Emergency Telecommunicator

And to get this all to work, we knew the biggest constraint would be the callers’ willingness to participate. We’ve all been conditioned by the most painful call-center robots (looking at you, Comcast) to scream for an operator and press “0” repeatedly. To break this habit, we needed to make an experience that made the caller want to participate.

We’ve made an agent that is conversational and powerful. It has the ability to truly understand what a caller needs (and even clarify with questions) and to take appropriate action. Callers think of IVRs just as hurdles to their end goal of reaching a person; by making ours powerful, we’re able to show them that this is the fastest and easiest way to give the community the help they need.

Two month review

"We could not take [Aurelian] out of [the Emergency Telecomunicators’] cold, dead hands…” — D.T. Donaldson, Director MACC 911

Even a few years ago, having an AI take all non-emergency calls was unimaginable. It’s relatively easy for United Airlines – 90% of their calls are booking flights, canceling flights, or complaining about flights – but PSAPs get calls about everything imaginable: from barking dogs to power outages to actual emergencies.

Now, with generative AI, we have the ability to provide near human-level support without taxing the already limited staffing resources. Our sole goal at Aurelian is to help 911 telecommunicators focus on 911 calls.

To learn more, please reach out to me directly via email: max@aurelian.io or book a time for a demo here. 

And here’s a photo of the cake celebrating AVA’s - the name the MACC team gave our AI agent - 10,000th call!