Wednesday, September 21, 2016

MiContact Center Quality Management for Public Safety Agencies Safeguarding Mission-Critical Communications

Clear, rapid and efficient communications are the foundation of effective public safety operations. Public safety organizations— including 9-1-1 call centers, law enforcement agencies, emergency dispatch services and fire departments—invest heavily in identifying and implementing the best communications technology. Ensuring citizens in need can communicate with dispatch operators, as well as making sure field personnel and dispatchers can communicate with each other, is of paramount concern. But, for public safety organizations, it is also important to maintain a reliable, easily accessible record of these mission-critical communications.


MiContact Center Quality Management for Public Safety Agencies Safeguarding Mission-Critical Communications Designed to Address Unique Public Safety Requirements MiContact Center Quality Management, the professional interaction management solution that delivers versatile recording functionality combined with powerful quality assurance, monitoring, output and recording tools. It leverages a patent-pending Mitel Portable Voice Document (PVD™) technology at its core. The PVD technology enables the capture of calls as digital recordings, or voice documents. Key features and benefits of the MiContact Center Quality Management solution for public safety organizations include: • Capture all communications activity to support legal and regulatory compliance requirements • Retrieve and playback call recordings quickly to confirm vital details • Manage and combine groups of related calls to support incident reconstruction and investigation • Evaluate interactions in real-time or after the fact to identify performance strengths and weaknesses • Coach workers using integrated instant messaging to immediately impact call handling performance Mitel | 2 With Mitel’s PVD technology, in addition to the audio portion of the call, all related data about the interaction is encapsulated as well. This can include information from the communications network, the PBX, user-added text-based annotations and call tagging. Annotations provide additional context around an incident, while call tagging enables dispatchers to quickly append an incident note, such as “high speed pursuit” or “civil disturbance,” to a recording with the simple click of a button. All of this data is then embedded into one single media file, the PVD, which is centrally stored, managed and delivered via highly secure encrypted media file streaming. All of the information contained in the PVD becomes searchable metadata, meaning call takers, agents and dispatchers can quickly locate a call using a wide range of search criteria. When a call recording is needed to provide situational insight or to prove that critical policies and procedures have been followed, it can be easily produced. Incident recordings and the included metadata can be safely and securely shared with other authorized users and oversight personnel to simplify event reconstruction and expedite investigations. It builds on the Mitel PVD technology foundation by providing advanced quality assurance, personnel development and reporting tools, along with other unique features and options of particular benefit to public safety agencies, including: • Incident Reconstruction: This allows managers and other authorized personnel to play up to eight recordings simultaneously. Multiple calls associated with a single incident can be bundled together for ease of playback and information retrieval. Each recording has variable speed, volume and balance controls, ensuring the accurate capture of critical information. • Portable Incident Replay: The OAISYS Stand-Alone PVD Player, which enables convenient replay of recordings in the field or in a courtroom, also allows multiple calls to be played back simultaneously. The player provides a call visualization timeline and a full set of playback controls, including variable speed, balance and volume • Desktop Screen Recording: The desktop video recording works in synchronization with the voice recording to capture screen content, providing greater oversight and more robust incident reconstruction functionality, without disrupting call handler or network efficiency. • Secure User Access: An advanced administrative application allows for easy assignment of individual and group permissions, ensuring incident recordings are accessed only by those with proper authority and in accordance with established agency guidelines. In addition, log files showing the date, time and user name associated with the access of all recordings provide an audit trail to support legal and regulatory compliance requirements. • Flexible Recording Options: MiContact Center Quality Management is engineered to support sophisticated, highvolume recording needs and can operate either trunk-side or station-side and delivers data link integration with a wide range of business communications systems. Tracer also supports VOX recording for capturing dispatch center telephone and radio communications. Robust Evaluation, Training and Coaching Tools A slow or improper response to a public safety dispatch call can present serious legal implications. Solid communication skills and the ability to work well under extreme pressure are important qualities for police, fire, and ambulance dispatchers. In most cases, workers must develop these skills while on the job. They must deal with anxious or panicked callers, obtain critical information, assess caller needs and dispatch the appropriate response, all within a matter of moments. When emergency units are en route or on the scene, dispatchers must coordinate communication between multiple responders to ensure the appropriate deployment of resources for the situation. Effective evaluation, training and coaching tools that can help improve call taker and dispatcher proficiency with these challenging responsibilities are invaluable for public safety organizations. MiContact Center Quality Management allows a supervisor to review a recording and rate the call by grading a series of pre-selected questions/criteria. Calls can be evaluated live while they are in progress, and evaluations can contain an unlimited number of questions. Workers can also listen to and evaluate their own calls, helping to identify performance and workflow problems that may prevent caller needs from being met. MiContact Center Quality Management’s multi-channel Live Call Monitor feature allows calls to be monitored while in progress, enabling dispatch supervisors to easily and efficiently monitor interactions in real-time. The Auto Call Monitor feature enables automatic live monitoring of calls by worker or by dynamic search folders. This serves to streamline supervisor access for monitoring a range of important calls as they occur. This live and auto call monitoring functionality is further bolstered by the ability to add text-based comments directly to calls while they are in progress, which then become a permanent part of the incident recording along with the audio portion of the call. Communications center management can benefit from capturing observations in real-time and providing immediate feedback to their call handlers. It also provides fully integrated chat functionality, making it easier to oversee call handlers and provide support when needed. Dispatchers can request and obtain supervisor assistance via instant messaging. These communications are also logged in context with the audio recording, helping to support incident reconstruction. Flexible Storage, Easy Retrieval and Simple Playback Public safety agencies need to maintain call records for extended periods of time. A call may need to be reviewed months or even years after it occurred, and the risk of lost call data must be averted. The MiContact Center Quality Management software is deployed via built-to-order recording platforms with advanced fault tolerance and data protection capabilities to help ensure incident recordings are available when needed. In various configurations, from 56,000 up to 200,000 hours of call recordings can be stored on an Mitel Recording Server, and recordings can also be archived using the included DVD burner or over a Local Area Network (LAN) to an external storage resource. In public safety recording environments, it is common for courts, lawyers and compliance officers to request copies of dispatch communications, often with little advance notice. Tracer help to addresses those demands with simple and efficient call recording search and retrieval functionality, owed in part to its highly intuitive folder organizational structure. Similar to Microsoft Outlook©, static folders enable users to manually organize incident recordings as needed, while dynamic folders make it possible to automatically organize 
recordings based on pre-defined criteria or conditions set for that folder. Additionally, the MiContact Center Quality Management user interface is intuitively designed to help users quickly locate recordings by conducting a search on a wide variety of specific recording file attributes or by simply locating the recording within a dynamic search folder. The advanced search and retrieval capabilities allow public safety professionals to rapidly search hundreds of thousands of calls, delivering the correct recording or group of recordings in just seconds. In addition to sharing calls in PVD format via a secure link, authorized users can also export incident recordings to other file formats, such as WAV and MP3. Multi-channel export and playback allows related calls to be bundled together to efficiently create a total picture of the incident in question. A convenient and secure stand-alone player provides portable feature functionality for replaying incident recordings in courtroom environments or other remote settings. Reliable Call Recording and Incident Management Support MiContact Center Quality Management is a powerful call recording and incident management solution for emergency dispatch facilities, 9-1-1 centers and other public safety organizations. We combine the innovative call recording, playback and storage capabilities of our Mitel’s PVD technology with Tracer’s advanced functionality for quality assurance, incident reconstruction, employee coaching and training.

No comments:

Post a Comment