Enhance Public Services

The Richmond Housing Partnership (RHP) Group owns and manages over 10,000 properties in South West London, as well as managing shared ownership schemes, lease holder customers, tenant customers, garages and shops. Having outgrown their phone system, RHP needed a solution which would allow them to implement a call center and measure performance. The answer they chose was NEC's UNIVERGE SV8100 Communications Server and UCB (UC for Business) application, implementing a call center with 25 agents. RHP finds it can now deliver far better service to customers, a service which is continually improving as accurate performance measurement enables agent response to be optimized. As Jonathan Creaser, Head of ICT at Richmond Housing Partnership, put it: “Having the call center gave us that ability to track performance and to deliver a better and more joined up service to our customers.”

Performance is displayed in real-time on screens in the call center, providing management information regarding length of calls, how quickly the call was answered, and how well each agent is performing. During busy periods, the number of agents can be expanded by diverting calls to other extensions in the building. Callers who don't get through can be identified and called back, and repeat callers can be routed to the same agent. Customers are also able to request a call at a certain time through the website. Calls are now routed to the most appropriate person, allowing most queries to be dealt with during the first call. Calls can also be recorded, which is useful for training staff and improving the service. “I feel that we bought into a product that has got a well-defined road map because it's based on very solid technology,” says Creaser.

In the future RHP will increase integration between the phone system and its databases so that it can identify patterns in calls by geographical area and topic of call (repairs, antisocial behavior, and so on) which will enable them further improve their service. “It's brought us into a position where we can deliver a much better service to our customer on the phone,” says Creaser. “The vast majority of communication we have with our customers is on the phone so it was a critical thing that we needed to sort out.”

The Cherokee County Sheriff's Office (CSO) serves a community of 190,000 residents located 45 miles north of Atlanta, Georgia. It operates six patrol precincts, an adult detention center, the Criminal Investigations Annex and the Cherokee County Justice Center. Although professionally accounted one of the nation's leading enforcement agencies, CSO had begun to find that its identification-management process was impeding its ability to investigate and solve crimes. Without its own automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS), CSO had to rely on neighboring agencies to run prints through the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's AFIS database. “It was hours of driving to an AFIS workstation,” according to Captain Hubert Love of Cherokee Sheriff's Office. “Plus, we were asking another agency to perform the search, so our request went into their workflow and obviously their own search requests took priority over ours. The entire process was inefficient and negatively impacted our ability to enforce the law.”

NEC addressed the challenge with Integra-ID, an AFIS solution that provides latent print-search capability. The solution also includes biometric-identification capabilities to enable better matching. Captain Love: “We knew that NEC's AFIS delivers the best speed and accuracy when it comes to biometrics and matching. The state was using NEC's AFIS, so the integration would go smoother with an NEC workstation.”

With a locally managed fingerprint database, CSO can now optimize its process and manage its own policies regarding how prints are stored and searched. The Integra-ID solution is also integrated with the jail management and mug shot system, minimizing the chance of human error. Each subject being booked is scanned at the FastID terminal prior to booking to see if they have an existing record in the database. A check is also done at the FastID terminal prior to release to confirm their identity. A search on FastID for a one-to-one search typically takes two to three seconds for a result, while a one-to-many search takes an impressive eight to nine seconds. Latent searches with the entire database take about 60 to 90 seconds. “Our staff loves NEC's AFIS because they are getting their results within two minutes. They're used to waiting anywhere from one to three hours on a response from the state. NEC Integra-ID is fast.” The result is quicker and more accurate identity confirmation and a strengthened ability to conduct criminal investigations.