Case Study: Police Service

Profile

The Senior Commmunications Analyst of a high profile police service approached ADTEC with a requirement to provide a team call-out system. Ideally, they wanted to be able to call out say, a firearm response team with the minimum of manual involvement. It came from them checking the web for a suitable solution after being approached by a company with an alternative system. He had read the short description of ADTEC's ALERTS on the website and thought it might well fit their requirements.

Technical Issues/Challenges

The previous system required the person instigating the call-out to call the team members  individually and then get individual replies from each member saying whether they were available or not. This was a lengthy, inefficient and occasionally dangerous process as the person could well be driving to the scene while organising the calls. The alternative system could send multiple outbound sms messages, but they were unreliable in timing of delivery and did not let him know who was responding positively.

Solution

The voice messaging feature of ALERTS was the first step. It allowed them to tailor the call to the team to reflect the actual crisis event. By adding a new feature of a single sms reply to the instigator allowed him to tell immediately who had received the call and who was responding positively. The fact that the system blast dialled the team all in one go speeded up the call-out, and the fact that team members could be tried on several numbers or repeat numbers made the call itself much more efficient. The necessity for team members to enter simple PINs made sure that voicemail or other 'wrong' answers did not receive the voice message.

A demonstration was arranged at their local office where a large group of people were called with a message. On completion of this, a trial system was installed in so it could be run live on their own network. For security reasons, they did not release phone numbers outside the service. The trial went extremely well and an order was placed shortly afterwards.

Benefits

They used the new system for a year and then realised that not only it was speeding up all their call-out procedures, but that more and more people wanted to use it. After a further technical meeting in Sydney, it was decided to double up the system so there was a back up capability as well as extra capacity available for the additional teams.

A couple of minor issues were tidied up at the same time as the new system being installed, mainly in the area of database administration to make the system even easier to use and manipulate. ALERTS is now their main call-out system and has proved itself to be highly effective in streamling what was previously a very cumbersome process.

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