Public safety is going increasingly high tech. Though officers in the field are an indispensable and irreplaceable necessity, “manpower” is now being supplemented and augmented by “tech power.” From video analytics to license plate recognition to wearables and embedded sensors to drone-collected aerial imagery to digital fingerprint scanning to 3-D scanners to data-capturing apps, the future of public safety is digital.
Video Analytics
Though closed-camera TV footage (CCTV) has been in use for decades (the city of Chicago alone has over 24,000 recording devices in use), research indicates that 98% of video footage is not seen by anyone. After only 20 minutes of viewing, human attention is so limited that over 95% of incidents as broadcast into the command and control center are missed by personnel.
The use of video analytics overcomes these problems by rapidly analyzing, alerting, and reporting on CCTV footage without the loss of attention or errors intrinsic to human monitoring.
While CCTV alone is insufficient to deter or to deal with crime because the volume of output is beyond the human capacity to effectively analyze and respond to, video analytics can sift through tens of thousands of hours of footage with unprecedented speed, accurately identifying incidents that warrant further human investigation, freeing up the public safety workforce to concentrate on more important and pressing tasks.
Wearables and Embedded Sensors
Connected to bluetooth beacons and fueled by the power of GPS, wearables allow first responders to pinpoint the precise location of their team during fieldwork and high-stakes scenarios when coordination is at a premium and real-time response is critical.
Wearable technology harnesses WiFi mesh networks, beacons and powerful communication applications to enhance public safety and streamline tasks. This allows responders to move more quickly to the areas where aid is needed.
Motion sensors and tracking also allow wearables to monitor the responders themselves.
In the city of San Francisco, for example, a 35% reduction in firearms violence has occurred since the deployment of sensors in streetlights. The sensors detect and identify the location of gunfire, broadcasting alerts to dispatch centers and patrol cars so that they can investigate.
Drones and aerial imagery
For first responders, surveillance teams, and investigators, high quality aerial imagery and data is critical to collecting the real-time intelligence that’s needed to assess and act on an unfolding situation.
Search and Rescue is an activity where swiftness of response can be the difference between life and death. Drones fitted with thermal cameras provides rescuers with an easily deployable method that exponentially accelerates the search for missing people by highlighting thermal signatures that can be detected even through foliage.
Data Capture Apps
Apps are often thought of as represent the leading edge in digitized enhancements to public safety. SilentPartner, for example, is the only public safety app currently available that works with a smartphone to capture any and all data collected via smartphone use (phone calls, texts, images, etc), instantly tag or label this data for optimal information management, and immediately and securely transmit it to a personal or organizational database for retrieval and future analysis.
The SilentPartner app renders obsolete the need for multiple pieces of field equipment by consolidating the functions of a camera, voice recorder, laptop and cellphone into a single, simple to use app. With a tap of the touch screen, public safety personnel can label, categorize, store, and transmit data directly from the field, securely and without delay.
Advanced features of the SilentPartner system include Speech Analytics, which allows software to “listen” to the content of public safety workers’ calls. Trends within those calls are then automatically reported, which can help uncover commonalities between cases thought to be unrelated. This is especially useful for detective bureaus that exist across multiple precincts, because it allows investigators to easily find linked cases. Rough transcription of calls, keyword and phrase searches, and indexing of communications are also options available with SilentPartner.
At KOVA, we’re industry leaders in tech-driven public safety enhancements and solutions. Contact us today and see how our products can take you one step further into the future.
This is Part 2 of our post on transitioning to a fully-digital contact center. Read Part 1 here.
At KOVA, we can help you and your organization deliver superior customer experience while improving your bottom line through the latest in digital service solutions, from Customer Experience Survey Software to Workforce Optimization software and more.
In the recent past, digital was seen as an optional part of “business as usual.”
Currently, however, digital has become so integral to the way people work, communicate, and interact, that it’s no longer an optional part of “business as usual,” but rather its defining feature.
As Lindsey Anderson and Irving Wladawsky-Berger argue in their Harvard Business Review article, The 4 Things It Takes to Succeed in a Digital Economy, “The tail has become the dog. Digital is not just part of the economy — it is the economy.”
The in digital customer care — also known as e-care — is being driven by customers who are already using digital platforms to research and review products and, depending on their experience with these products, to publicly praise or criticize them via social media.
E-care involves the transition from service models based almost entirely on manned service counters and traditionally run call centers with live representatives, to digital services via web-based user accounts, social networks, mobile phone, the Internet, and increasingly automated contact centers.
At KOVA, we’ve got extensive experience in guiding businesses in the transition to fully operational digital contact centers. The advantages of adopting e-care are worth the effort, and practically every consumer-facing industry that requires extensive customer-relationship management — from financial services to consumer electronics to healthcare and utilities — can benefit.
Digital customer service also provides superior customer satisfaction.
Research from Deloitte found that “76% of telecommunications customers are satisfied with a customer service journey that is fully digital, compared with 57% satisfaction for interactions through traditional channels. When you consider that migration to e-care can, in our experience, reduce call volumes and operating expenses by 25 to 30 percent, its benefits seem obvious.”
But, Deloitte cautions, “These statistics mask the fact that few purchase journeys or service interactions are handled entirely digitally: while 41% of service interactions with telecommunications companies begin on an e-care platform, just 15% are digital from start to finish.”
These statistics alone demonstrate that a truly digital contact center isn’t just a matter of stacking digital options on top of a non-digital foundation of service offerings or product choices. Just as a major product launch or strategic initiative must be executed only with intensive planning and cross-organizational coordination and support, so too must the transition from traditional channels to digital customer care be approached as an incremental, multi-stage undertaking.
What follows are some strategic considerations and guidelines for this transitional process:
Auditing your customer service requests through speech analytics can also be illuminating. One company found that although there were a 2,000 different reasons for customers to contact a call center, only 60 problems (a mere 3% of the total) comprised 65% percent of call volume and 55% of costs. Further, just 15 of these 60 problems had an online solution. The implications for this were that designing online solutions for the remaining 45 priority issues could potentially cut the company’s call volume and costs by as much as half.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post!
Customer service has changed drastically from the days of telephone-only call centers. From automated systems to chatbots to 24/7 online service, there are certainly a lot of new ways for your contact center agents to provide your customers with excellent service.
But what about social media? Are sites like Twitter and Facebook perhaps the real future of customer service? And if that’s the case, how can your agents make sure that they’re providing the best possible service over social media? Over the past several years, social media has grown to become almost as important an element of the customer service field as those other innovations, and it’s crucial for your center to provide the best possible service through these new avenues.
Here are some tips on how to do so.
First, determine which platforms fit your needs
The first thing a contact center has to do is figure out what social media outlets to use. Which one of the many different platforms are your customers using most?
Whichever they may be, those are the ones where you need to make the most resources and agents available. While Facebook and Twitter might be the most obvious choices simply because of their overall popularity in the general population, don’t forget that there might also be concentrations of your customers on sites like Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest and Google+, as well.
Make use of monitoring tools
There are plenty of tools out there that allow companies to keep track of their social media mentions. This capability is often built in to customer feedback software, like KOVA’s Enterprise Customer Feedback Management Software. Listening is, after all, one of the most important factors in providing excellent customer service, and there have been consumer studies done that indicate that consumers expect business to monitor their social media outlets for both positive and negative comments.
What are the issues that seem to keep coming up with the product or client your contact center is providing service for? Knowing the answer to that might help your agents provide customers with faster solutions to their problems.
Make timely responses a priority
Speed is important in every aspect of customer service, but social media is an arena where a contact center’s response has to be even faster than normal, simply because of the consumer’s expectations. The immediacy of platforms like Twitter and Facebook have conditioned people to expect their queries to be seen and answered certainly within a day, and sometimes a matter of hours.
If you neglect these channels, your customer already has the best possible platform on which to express their displeasure, and they’re virtually guaranteed to do so if you don’t respond in a timely and satisfactory fashion.
Train your agents to put their customer service skills to work in this new format
What makes a contact center agent an excellent customer service provider? It’s their ability to provide comfort, understanding and knowledgeable solutions in a quick and professional manner, right? Those skills might not be easy to find, but once you have agents who can do all of that, it stands to reason that they would be able to transfer those abilities to another area beyond telephone work.
These are ultimately the skills that will help you provide great customer service regardless of where you’re doing it from.
Know when it’s time to transfer the service conversation to another channel
Although social media can be an effective way to handle many customer service issues, it’s important to know when you’ve reached the limits of what an agent can accomplish in this format. Make sure your agents know when it’s time to complete the conversation via private chat or on the phone.
Most issues brought up on social media can be solved there, but some can’t, and an escalating discussion with a customer is best handled in a more private setting, both to give the customer more individualized and focused attention, and to end a potentially damaging public thread of comments.
For more on bringing your customer service fully into the 21st century, read “Omnichannel Customer Service Should Span Both the Physical and Virtual Worlds.”
There’s a new idea that’s fast gaining speed in many areas of business, and it’s called predictive analytics. It’s a complex process with a relatively simple definition. Predictive analytics is a branch of advanced analytics that is used to create predictions about what might occur in the future.
By combining processes and methods including data mining, statistics, and artificial intelligence, predictive analytics programs are able to analyze huge amounts of data - both structured and unstructured - from the past to develop predictive intelligence.
Here are just a few ways that predictive analytics can help your contact center perform its tasks more efficiently.
Customer retention
Customer retention is one of the most important ways that predictive analytics can help contact centers improve their outcomes.
The traditional thinking is that it costs more money to seek out new customers than to keep the ones that already exist. In fact, some statistics suggest that it can cost almost 10 times as much to gain a new customer as it can to hold onto an existing one.
Predictive analytics can help a call center maintain and improve their customer retention rate through the use of applications like speech analytics.
By analyzing a company’s speech analytics data, and combining that with analysis of other data sets, predictive analytics programs can identify the customers who have the highest probability of ending their relationship with the company.
These customers can be flagged, which allows agents to be more focused on those specific customers and on trying to repair the relationship.
Predicting the success of follow-up contacts
When it comes to collections and sales, the rate of success on a first call can be relatively low, and it’s often necessary for a second or even a third call for your efforts to bear fruit.
Figuring out which customers actually warrant a callback isn’t always an easy process. In sales and collection situations, customers’ responses may not clear the first time around, leaving it up to the agent to figure out whether or not a follow-up call is worthwhile. This is a spotty method at best.
But using predictive analytics can make that process much more precise.
Using data like the number of times they’ve contacted or been contacted, phrases they’ve uttered, their buying history, and plenty more, a predictive analytics program can predict the likelihood that further contacts will result in a sale.
Once that analysis is completed, the customers can be put into a ranking that lets the agent know which ones are most likely to say yes or no to their efforts, allowing them to prioritize calls.
Increased quality and efficiency
Under the old systems of analysis, it could potentially take weeks for an agent’s performance to be assessed properly through spot-check call monitoring. And if there’s an issue with an agent’s technique, that’s simply too long to let it continue.
Thanks to predictive analytics software, that’s no longer an issue. The system provides a full set of data from every calls, allowing evaluation time to be cut from weeks to days.
The more quickly a supervisor or trainer can address an issue that an agent is having, the more quickly it can be corrected, which can then improve customer satisfaction almost immediately. By replacing the old manual assessment system with predictive analytics, a call center can make itself stronger than ever before.
Predictive analytics can give your contact center greater insight into what’s coming down the pipeline, and allow you to see trends that you’d have otherwise missed. For more on how analytics can help you meet KPIs, read “How Monitoring Your Contact Center KPIs Can Lead You to Better Customer Service.”
Technological innovations come faster every year, and public safety technology is no different. Keeping up with what’s available, as well as what you may want to implement, can be a challenge for even the most well-staffed agency.
There could be some reluctance involved, as well, both from supervisors and employees, simply because they’ve grown used to what they’re using. But when the safety of the public is involved, it’s important to move past that inertia and embrace new and faster ways of doing things. After all, it could mean more lives saved.
So what’s the key to advocating for new technology and making sure your staff is ready and willing to use it? Here are some strategies that might come in handy.
Have open, honest conversations about the new technology with your staff
The first step in this process doesn’t really involve the new tech you may have your eye on at all. It simply involves talking to your staff, co-workers, and supervisors about why you want to implement a new technology.
What are your ideas, and what are their reservations? What can you do to allay some of their concerns (whether those are around budget, downtime, training, etc.)? What issues do they have that you might not have considered? Do you have all the information you want to present to them ready? Are you prepared for the answers you might receive?
These are all important questions, and they can be answered only by talking to those around you in your agency.
Bring in your PIO
A Public Information Officer’s job is often to convey facts in the most palatable way possible for public or media consumption, so why not consult with them on the best way to break the ice in terms of bringing in new technology?
These are people who are trained in communication methods, and they already have a connection with the public safety staff you want to talk to. Your PIO can help you figure out the best way possible to present your case. Remember, there’s nothing wrong with asking for help or taking advantage of a crucial resource to get your point across.
Don’t skimp on training
How will the new technology you’re thinking about be best integrated into the existing programs at your agency? How can you ensure that a new employee can be trained in an efficient, thorough, and effective manner?
Training staff is going to be the most crucial part of bringing in the new tech you’re thinking about, so make sure you have a comprehensive plan going in.
Engage your partners
Are there any private or non-governmental partners your agency works with that need to be brought on board? How will the technology that you’re implementing affect the agencies you communicate with?
As cities and towns are moving more toward interconnectedness and the “smart city” model, it’s becoming increasingly important to look beyond just your department or agency, and focus on the big picture. Who else would be involved in helping to bring new technology into the existing framework of your agency?
And don’t be afraid to reach out to potential vendors. At KOVA, we consider it part of our job to help potential customers determine how public safety technology can help their organizations.
Advocacy for positive change is an important part of any person’s work, but it’s perhaps even more important in the field of public safety. Don’t give up on what you think might bring your agency into a new, better era.
For more on this topic, read our post “What’s Next for Public Safety Technology?”
Artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting concepts in our world today, whether it’s in the fanciful flights of science fiction or in our day-to-day lives. The idea of a vastly intelligent computerized system taking over many of the tasks that humans are responsible for now can be cast as a disturbing one in literature, but in the real world it can actually improve our lives immensely.
This is doubly true in the world of public safety. There was a time when it would’ve been impossible to imagine technology taking over some of the dangerous tasks that public safety workers have to deal with every day, but that time is upon us. Here are some of the ways that AI has affected and changed public safety and law enforcement.
Robotic Bomb Detection and Deactivation
One of the most direct ways that AI has become useful to public safety is in the detection and deactivation of explosive devices and materials.
It’s frightening to imagine the risk to human life that used to exist before robots were employed to go into a situation involving a bomb or other kind of explosive device and disable them. Thanks to this technology, many lives have been saved, both in terms of the general public and the brave public safety workers who were once directly in harm’s way.
Drones
However controversial the subject of drone use has become in the political arena, the fact remains that in terms of surveillance, drones have been a revolutionary innovation.
Not only are drones far easier to deploy than the traditional methods of surveillance, but they’re harder to detect, and their ability to maneuver quickly is invaluable.
A drone can soar to great heights or close in tightly, allowing it to gather information on a much wider scale than traditional surveillance ever could. And it’s worth noting that, should a drone be detected and eliminated by those under surveillance, the only damage is financial. The lives of public safety workers aren’t in any danger if a drone is lost.
Social Media Scanning
Everyone, it seems, has a Facebook or Twitter account, and that unfortunately goes for the bad guys, too. Many of us have seen the news stories of terrorist organizations like ISIS using social media to recruit new members and send messages to far-flung cells.
In the age of AI, those social media posts and messages can be monitored and parsed for dangerous or suspicious words or phrases, allowing public safety and law enforcement agencies to thwart potential attacks before they happen. There can be little better argument for the use of AI than the fact that lives have been saved from terror attacks.
But that’s not all that these new AI monitoring systems can do. They can also keep an eye on individuals who may be vulnerable to radicalization by dangerous organizations, monitoring their communications and social media posts to make sure that they aren’t becoming a threat to those around them.
As we mentioned above with drones, this is a somewhat controversial process due to concerns about invasion of privacy, but again, it’s difficult to argue the point that AI has made it easier than ever for law enforcement agencies to monitor possible activity by dangerous individuals or organizations and save lives.
A New Frontier: Interrogation
There’s been an interesting development in recent AI technology that could be put into wider use in the near future all over the world, and its name is Brad.
In the Netherlands, researchers have created a chatbot (the aforementioned Brad) who can detect possible deception in the interrogation of a suspect using a complex system of algorithms and speech analysis.
It’s a very nascent technology, but imagine a police interrogation being conducted via AI while actual law enforcement officers are in the field following up on the information that a machine like Brad can elicit from a suspect.
For more of what the future holds for public safety, read our post “Where is Public Safety Software Headed?”
