Three Tips for Measuring Public Safety Performance

Written by KOVA Corp

In every industry, organizations have to find effective, accurate ways to measure their performance.

For certain industries, this can be fairly straightforward. Take retail, for instance. Retailers can measure daily, weekly, and monthly sales figures to get an accurate idea of how they’re performing compared to last month or last year.

Contact centers can measure things like First Call Resolution and Call Abandonment rates to gauge their customers’ level of satisfaction.

But in the public safety industry, measuring performance is often much more nuanced. Sure, there are certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be easily tracked, but how do you measure citizen satisfaction, or citizens’ feeling of safety? These questions are much more challenging to answer.

Here are a few tips for effectively measuring your own public safety organization’s performance.

Collect and analyze data whenever possible.

With today’s technology, we’re able to collect truly massive amounts of data.

And we don’t just have to go through traditional channels anymore: citizens are reporting crimes, quality of life issues, and public safety problems via social media, while the internet has made gathering data through surveys and other formal requests easier than ever.

While this has given public safety organizations plenty of information to work with, it also means they have to figure out how to use it. This can require additional resources, whether in the form of personnel, technology, or time.

These can be hard sells in an era when budget cuts continue to plague most government agencies. However, it’s not impossible - take this example from an article in City Smart Data Solutions. Back in 2011, the Santa Cruz Police Department was suffering from a 30 percent hike in calls they received while dealing with 20 percent less staff than they’d had since 2000.

As they were dealing with short resources, they had to think creatively about how to address this problem. So they decided to hire a mathematician and professor to develop a formula for predicting future crimes. This creative use of data allowed the department to continue to serve its population well, even though they were understaffed.

Identify your key KPIs.

Each public safety agency, from fire to police to Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) has specific performance measures, or KPIs, that it keeps track of.

But how do you know whether you’re keeping track of the right ones - the ones that will optimally inform your organization’s policies?

One way to do this is to compare your KPIs to those of other similar agencies. A PSAP, for example, could compare its KPIs to those tracked by another PSAP that serves a comparable population, as well as another PSAP located in a nearby town.

Not only can this offer PSAP managers a bigger-picture view of their industry as a whole, but it can also facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas and strategies that benefit all parties involved.

Invest in public safety analytics technology.

The right technology can make collecting and sorting through all your public safety data much, much easier. Take speech analytics technology: with Verint Media Recorder for Public Safety’s optional speech analytics capability, 911 calls are transcribed and then made searchable.

Using guided, visual search tools, the software can help users identify trends and insights hidden within related calls, as well as areas that need improvement. Verint Media Recorder’s speech analytics tool is also useful in identifying training opportunities to improve call-taker performance.

There are also excellent social media analytics tools available to help public safety organizations make sense of the information they receive online almost constantly from citizens.

Without some kind of analytics software or service, it can be nearly impossible to gain even a fraction of the usable intelligence that’s available.

To learn more about how data can best inform your public safety agency’s practices, read our whitepaper “Speech Analytics in Today’s Emergency Communications Center.”

Is Your Organization Ready to Optimize their Public Safety Systems?

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