Sometimes they literally don’t have the ability to press 1.
Which is why I’m saying it should go through automatically after a short delay.
It’s easy to say “just over staff” until you’re faced with the reality that maybe once every five years, for a grand total of one hour, you’re faced with call pressure 1000 times higher than the second highest spike. It’s not viable to staff a response center to deal with thousands of people calling in the same bomb attack or shooting within minutes, when you normally see on the order of hundreds of calls per week.
What you need is the capacity to deal with 99.99… % of situations, and a safety mechanism to prevent the remaining situations from overloading your system more than necessary.
In a mass casualty event, you need to be able to filter out the people making redundant reports in order to effectively handle the important reports. You need to do that without blocking out the important reports, that’s the hard part.
This is actually a product intrado sells to places to handle overflow 911 calls, it’s been a Thing forever, unfortunately seems like municipalities are getting drunk on the AI kool-aid like everyone else 😢
You can’t put a barrier between emergency services and someone in an emergency. Sometimes they literally don’t have the ability to press 1.
Just overstaff your call center. That’s it.
Spend a little extra money to ensure your emergency workers aren’t stressed out 24x7, and they’ll have the staff to manage a bigger event.
It’s an emergency service. Spend money on it like it’s important.
Which is why I’m saying it should go through automatically after a short delay.
It’s easy to say “just over staff” until you’re faced with the reality that maybe once every five years, for a grand total of one hour, you’re faced with call pressure 1000 times higher than the second highest spike. It’s not viable to staff a response center to deal with thousands of people calling in the same bomb attack or shooting within minutes, when you normally see on the order of hundreds of calls per week.
What you need is the capacity to deal with 99.99… % of situations, and a safety mechanism to prevent the remaining situations from overloading your system more than necessary.
In a mass casualty event, you need to be able to filter out the people making redundant reports in order to effectively handle the important reports. You need to do that without blocking out the important reports, that’s the hard part.
This is actually a product intrado sells to places to handle overflow 911 calls, it’s been a Thing forever, unfortunately seems like municipalities are getting drunk on the AI kool-aid like everyone else 😢