For people across several generations in America, Neighborhood Watch signs have been a regular feature in their lives. Posted on signposts around certain neighborhoods, they signal that a group of citizens in the community is committed to working with law enforcement to keep that area safe and secure.

The Neighborhood Watch began in 1972, in a move towards involving citizenry in the fight against a high rate of crime, specifically burglaries. The idea is that “formal” control agencies like law enforcement can’t be everywhere at once. But by involving “informal” control through citizens who want a safe neighborhood, crime can be reduced and neighborhoods can take some responsibility for their own safety.

The Current State Of Affairs

Fast-forward to our current decade. The problem of crime hasn’t magically been solved, but the technology available to fight it, and involve citizens, has been drastically advanced. In fact, thanks to the internet, and especially social media, it’s now easier than ever for citizens to connect with law enforcement and report suspicious activities, crime, or vandalism in their community.

How Can Citizens Become Involved?

The Neighborhood Watch hasn’t gone anywhere. There are still thousands of Neighborhood Watches across the United States, and their classic Boris the Burglar sign is known by every would-be criminal.

But there are now many other ways that citizens can become involved in helping law enforcement keep our communities safe. Citizens now get Amber Alerts on their phones when a child is abducted. They can also tip off police about crimes through social media and their phones. Interestingly, it’s been found that people are often more forthcoming using this method than they would be in person.

In fact, in 2013, a survey from the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that over 80% of departments had used social media to help solve crimes. Another 73% said they felt social media had helped to improve relations between police and their community. That’s because social media lets normal citizens interact with departments and officers in ways they never could have before.

Humanizing Police

An interesting side-effect of law enforcement social media accounts is that in many cases they help to humanize police. When police departments respond humorously to would be trolls online, or post funny photos, they help the general public to remember that there are people behind those accounts, just as there are people behind those uniforms. That’s an important goal for all police departments, especially during times when mistrust of law enforcement is high. Social media’s ability to humanize law enforcement officers is not a small matter.

Technology may have advanced considerably since the founding of the Neighborhood Watch, but the need for citizen involvement is still the same. Whether it’s through social media or at a monthly meeting, there’s always something citizens can do to help keep their communities safe.

If you’d like to read more about how technology is affecting different areas of our public safety system, then read “Why 911 Dispatching is So Different Today.”

Performance management, quality management, and workforce management are all essential management types for a contact center. However, there are times when one comes to the forefront, and right now, performance management is trending in contact centers.

This is a departure from what we were seeing, which is a focus on quality management. It seems that increased priority is being given to individual productivity rather than the quality metrics that many contact centers are accustomed to. This doesn’t mean that quality management is suddenly unimportant, only that performance management is being used to great effect right now.

This may change again in the future, as these trends have a way of coming in and out of vogue. However, if you’re looking to shift to a more performance management based system, then you may have some questions. Here are some of the key points that you need to keep in mind about your performance management system.

Create Trust

There’s no way to successfully bring about a change in your contact center without a foundation of trust between management and your team members. This means being clear and transparent about any changes in expectations, evaluation criteria, or any other aspect of their job. Outline it all for them so that they understand the end goal.

Follow Through

There’s nothing worse for your management shift than not following through on goals and promises. Once you’ve laid out what changes will take place, and how you’ll go about implementing them, you have to see it through to the end. Otherwise, you’ll create confusion and team members won’t feel comfortable with the system or your leadership.

Identify Strengths And Weaknesses

You can use performance management to help your employees identify their own strengths and weaknesses. Use the data to show them where they excel and where their strengths lie. But instead of highlighting weaknesses, use them as an opportunity to point to areas where team members can grow.

Use Rewards

Without any kind of reward, it’s hard for team members to embrace a more performance oriented style of management and evaluation. Focusing strictly on the numbers can lead to a deterioration of your team’s morale. Setting up a reward system that works with your performance management system is a good way to maintain morale and trust within your team. They know that if they hit certain targets as individuals and as a team, they’ll be rewarded appropriately.

Don’t Forget About Quality

Performance management systems emphasize different metrics more strongly than quality management. However, they aren’t two separate areas that never overlap. Don’t forget that hitting targets doesn’t necessarily say anything about the quality of the work. You may be pivoting away from quality management, but you shouldn’t completely turn your back on it.

Looking for tools to help you with your shift to performance management? Then contact KOVA today. We have the software you need to ensure that you can capture and analyze the necessary data in your contact center.

Ambient UX is a term that’s been around for a while, but hasn’t gained a lot of traction until recently. It refers to the way in which connections, capabilities, and content are delivered to those who need them through devices, apps, and services. The reason it’s called Ambient UX is that this delivery is meant to be seamless, continuous, and self-adjusting—providing a natural, ambient feel to the delivery.

As you can imagine, this has serious implications for public safety officers. The data that they rely on day in and day out must be delivered at the correct time, to the correct device, and in the correct context. Because of the growing number of devices that officers use—smartphones, laptops, body cameras, and radios to name a few—it’s more important than ever that Ambient UX be available to officers. It allows them to move from device to device, while knowing that the user experience will remain consistent and adapt when it needs to.

For private individuals, Ambient UX will eventually do everything from adjusting their thermostat to locking doors and dimming lights in the evening. The key is that this is all a process that feels natural to the user. The doors lock because that’s the routine before bed. The lights dim because someone is watching TV late in the evening. Users shouldn’t have to be continually fighting against what’s happening around them.

And that’s how Ambient UX needs to be for public safety officers. They shouldn’t have to feel like they’re fighting their communications or capabilities as they’re delivered. Getting a message on the radio, but also having it relayed over the phone a minute or two later is redundant and occupies attention. That’s what much of the push towards Ambient UX for officers is about—allowing them to focus more fully on their job without continuously pulling their attention away to multiple devices.

The U.S. has begun to pave the way for Ambient UX with FirstNet, the national wireless broadband network dedicated entirely to public safety. As FirstNet continues to move forward, it will provide public safety officials and officers with the interoperable system that they need.

It’s a complex feat to fully integrate all of the different devices, apps, and services that officers need to use, but the payoff can be tremendous.

At KOVA, we offer a number of different products and services that help public safety organizations meet the goals of Ambient UX. Our KEANS Service provides reliable, simultaneous communications between multiple agencies, partners, locations, and public-address systems.

For individual public safety officers and officials, our Silent Partner technology turns your phone into a recorder and helps capture all relevant data such as Caller ID, GPS location, and Dialed Digits. Silent Partner also offers speech analytics to help find trends and commonalities within recorded calls.

As technology continues to advance, it’s important that public safety officials are able to use it to enhance their work, instead of becoming frustrated by the overwhelming amount of tech they’re expected to use. Contact us today if you’d like to learn more about simplifying and streamlining your communications.

Body cameras have been a growing trend in law enforcement over the past several years. In many cases, these cameras are billed as ways to keep officers accountable by providing a video record of civilian encounters. But these body cameras aren’t just about accountability. Like so many other types of public safety technology, they’re also playing a role in helping officers in difficult situations.

There’s plenty of evidence that body cameras are doing as much good for officers as they are for the public’s confidence in their law enforcement officials.

Providing Evidence Against Criminals

In one case, Bell County, TX found that body cameras were helping them to bring more domestic abusers to justice. The county equipped 300 of their officers with body cameras, and sure enough, fewer domestic violence cases were dismissed. What happened? Well, because of the relationship that exists between many perpetrators and victims of domestic violence, there is a tendency for the victims to recant statements or refuse to cooperate with law enforcement after the fact.

Officers would show up to a domestic violence call, but later on the case would be dismissed when the victim decided not to cooperate. With body cameras, the evidence is captured during the initial call, making it hard to disprove that the violent incident took place. That’s led to a precipitous drop in the number of domestic violence cases being dismissed.

The video doesn’t lie, and that makes it great for providing nearly irrefutable evidence for certain crimes that officers encounter.

Fewer Accidents

In any tense situation, especially those that law enforcement officers face every day, it doesn’t take much for things to deteriorate and a situation to turn violent. This is when serious accidents or mistakes can happen. But body cameras have an interesting effect on interactions between the police and civilians. While officers may be conscious that their actions are being filmed, so are the civilians.

In New Carrollton, MD, police found that when civilians knew they were being recorded, they behaved better, as well. Less combativeness from civilians and accountability for officers is a recipe for fewer dangerous confrontations that can result in accidents and liability for law enforcement agencies.

In fact, complaints against police officers fell by 88% after officers in Rialto, CA began wearing body cameras. Another telling statistic—use of force by Rialto’s officers fell by 60%. Those are incredible statistics, and they point to the positive effects of the body camera on both those wearing them, and those who are being recorded.

Having a record of civilian encounters with police is a step in the right direction for healing divides between police and community members, as well as providing officers with better evidence in many cases.

The role of technology in law enforcement is going to continue to grow as more departments equip their officers with body cameras and other new tech. To learn more about where law enforcement is headed in the coming years, read “Top 5 Law Enforcement Trends Affecting Police in 2017.”

With the rise of big data has come an increased interest in business intelligence, or BI, software. Essentially, what BI software does is analyze an organization’s data to help zero in on where the company’s strengths and weaknesses are, as well as allow business leaders to make better-informed business decisions.

Although BI software hasn’t historically been used much in contact centers, that’s starting to change. Contact center managers are realizing that BI solutions are actually a great fit for the industry - after all, BI software runs on data, and contact centers are highly effective data-gathering operations.

This is especially true if the contact center is using additional enterprise solutions as well, like Enterprise Feedback Management software or Customer Experience Survey software.

So what should you be looking for in a BI tool to implement in your contact center? Here are some key areas of development.

Data discovery

One of the biggest areas of interest in BI right now is data discovery, which is basically a more intuitive, faster method of getting data for one-off or occasional questions.

Data discovery tools, which are often embedded within larger BI suites, have a flexible functionality so that the BI data can be accessed easily, both for the purposes of analysis and general collection. Unlike data pulled from a full BI solution, results from data discovery are presented in a much more visually appealing way, without too much data query formatting or developer language.

Everything from data on basic questions, to possible future trends, to developments within an organization’s workflow can be spotted using the discovery method. That’s part of why a recent survey of 2800 BI professionals on BI trends found that it was “very important” to a majority of respondents.

Self-service

The definition of self-service business intelligence is not as obvious as the phrase would suggest. It doesn’t necessarily mean that any contact center employee can access a BI system and get the data they need.

Rather, it means that the BI data can be delivered in such a way that it can be analyzed be someone other than a data analyst.

Using the self-service model, a user would be able to work with intuitive software - a program that can anticipate what the user needs and adapt the information it provides to that purpose in simple, easy-to-understand terms - to find the data they’re looking for.

In other words, in a self-service system, the results are filtered through the user’s own instincts, with a data-governance system in place to prevent them from coming to an incorrect conclusion.

Master data management

Like data discovery, master data management is a technique designed to make data sharing easier and faster.

With master data management, all of an organization’s BI data is placed in one file, called a master file. This file provides a point of reference that all users will have in common, and also streamlines the process of data-sharing among those in different departments.

It’s helpful to have all your data in one place when the sales department and the customer service department ask the same question - with something like data discovery, those two queries could return different answers. With master data management, every department should get the same answer to whatever question they ask.

These are just a few of the most attention-drawing trends in BI software - there are many more. But judging by the amount of interest in these three key areas, it’s easy to believe that contact centers that put their attention on these early will get the best results from their BI software.

For more on the latest technology for contact centers, read our post “Contact Centers and Cloud Technology.”

As familiar as a conversation with a real live contact center agent might be, the simple fact of the matter is that people’s increasingly hectic and unpredictable schedules make it difficult for a contact center to always have someone manning the lines, or the PC, when a customer reaches out for help.

That’s where the chatbot comes in. A chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) online chat tool that can respond to simple questions from customers with about 90% accuracy.

Chatbots are able to help a customer 24 hours, 7 days a week. But how do you ensure your chatbot is providing not just good, but great customer service, from resolving the issue to treating the customer with respect? Here are some best practices for using chatbots the right way.

Chatbots are most effective when they work alongside your human agents - not as a replacement for them

When chatbots first came on the customer service scene, there were many questions on how these little AI programs would end up operating. Some thought they’d replace live agents all together. Others thought the technology was a waste of time.

In the few years since they’ve become more widespread, it’s become clear that chatbots are best used as supplements, or integrations, for live customer service. This is partly because the technology just isn’t advanced enough for chatbot programs to fully fulfill customers’ needs. It’s also because, at least for now, a majority of Americans - 79% - believe that talking to chatbots is a waste of time.

Chatbots are best utilized as a way to help customers with simple questions that can be answered immediately. For the banking industry, that might be “What is my account balance?” For an IT support center, that could be “Why won’t my monitor turn on?”

Start sooner rather than later

The chatbot might be unfamiliar to many call centers, but most experts in the industry foresee widespread use within the next 5 years. If your center reacts too slowly, the competition could benefit greatly from that hesitance.

Begin the learning process now, and prepare for investment in a chatbot system fairly soon. It’s always good to remember that being caught unprepared when a new innovation rolls through the industry could doom your contact center to being left in the dust, no matter how well it’s doing today.

Make sure your chatbot is smart enough to handle many different questions on many different topics

When you’re planning on how to best implement this new technology, it’s important to remember that the chatbot is supposed to “intelligent” - in theory, customers shouldn’t be able to tell when they’re talking to a bot versus a person (although we’re still a ways away from this reality).

Chatbots get smarter and better at their jobs when they’re fed data. Since contact centers collect data on their customers every minute that they’re operating, contact center chatbots should have all they need to perform to a very high standard.

You just have to ensure with your developer that your chatbot is programmed to integrate its own data with that of your contact center solution platform.

Develop your own team of resources to help you launch and maintain your chatbots

Who are the experts that can help you with your chatbot questions? Remember, just because you’re a contact center that handles customer issues doesn’t mean that there’s nowhere to turn when you have them.

This is exciting technology, but it’s also new and developing. It’s natural that people are going to have questions about how to use it properly. Before you invest in a chatbot, make sure you’ll have the tech support and resources for help you’ll need to deal with any issues that might arise or questions you might have.

It might be a daunting prospect to consider bringing in and creating a chatbot, simply because it’s such a new form of technology. But if used correctly, it can be a real asset to a call center.  It’s an innovation worth pursuing.

For more on innovation in the contact center, read “Why IT Support Agents Need the Latest in Call Center Support Software.”

Big data is one of the most exciting and potentially useful technological advancements in the modern era of public safety. And it’s intriguing for a couple of reasons.

First off, the idea of big data is a simple one, even though it’s actually revolutionary: Big data simply means that an entity receives extremely large data sets that can be analyzed to reveal trends, associations and patterns, especially in the areas of human interactions and behavior.

This allows public safety agencies to collect more information than ever before - it may even make them able to stop crime or other emergencies before they happen. And it’s incredible to think that the technology to collect big data wasn’t really available, at least economically, until the last decade or so.

Here are some of the ways that big data use can help those in the law enforcement and public safety fields.

Social media monitoring

There have been many changes in the way we communicate in society, but the intelligence community has always used some form of communication analysis to determine who’s who in a network of criminals.

Back before the technology existed to do so more easily, intelligence operations often required many people recording the communication and movements of suspicious or criminal individuals.

Now, the digital age allows for much easier tracking of information that can be collected into big data sets. From Facebook posts to emails and beyond, a criminal network can be recorded through digital analysis tools, which is a seismic shift from the way things used to be.

Drawing connections between cases

There was once a time when different cases that seemed to have no relation to one another could only be connected through the deduction skills of investigators working long hours.

But now, software that includes speech analytics programs and specialized case management and analysis technology can bring entire disparate departments (and the notes they’ve taken) together. That allows those studying the data to make connections between different crimes and the individuals who may have committed them.

With access to this wealth of information under the big data umbrella, public safety and law enforcement agencies can test hypotheses, and verify their information more quickly than ever.

Creating crime prediction models

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the big data system is the way it allows public safety and law enforcement agencies to combine different sources of data to create a single model - like one that might help them predict potential criminal behavior.

With the massive amounts of data these agencies now have access to, public safety workers might now be able to predict a spike in crime and the areas in which it could occur. An agency acting proactively could then divert their resources towards making sure that that spike doesn’t happen.

Cybersecurity

There’s been such a surge in new technology over the past decade, technology that can be used for both good and criminal purposes, that there’s no real precedent for it in history. As the world has overwhelmingly gone paperless, it’s created a treasure trove of digitized information that those with nefarious purposes can access far more easily than ever before. Digital information might be convenient, but it’s also less secure.

Big data helps public safety and law enforcement agencies keep track of all the information out in cyberspace and how it’s being used. Sensitive information can’t fall into the wrong hands, and this new public safety technology gives law enforcement agencies the ability to keep up with hackers and other criminals.

In addition, using big data analytics programs to regularly scan for malware, ransomware, holes in code, and other cybersecurity threats can greatly improve the chances that attacks by hackers will be either prevented or caught early on.

Big data can accomplish a lot of goals for public safety agencies that were a lot more difficult to achieve even a few years ago. For more on big data, read our post “How to Gain Actionable Intelligence from Big Data.”

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