As part of an effort to achieve “sustainable staffing goals,” the Summit County 911 Center will use an automated nonemergency triage system to answer calls from the county’s nonemergency number.

The center began internal testing of the system in January, and director Michael Berry told the Summit Board of County Commissioners at a Nov. 4 work session that staff is ready for a live rollout.

The system will roll out in three phases, with each lasting about a month. The first will start in mid-November if all goes well, Berry said. The hours of day and days of the week the system is active will increase with each phase, and the system will be active full-time during phase three.

Berry said the system will allow dispatchers to focus more attention on in-progress and lift-threatening incidents. He said 72% of calls the center receives are from the nonemergency phone line.

“Many of these calls are informational requests that are handled by the dispatcher,” Berry said. “Not every phone call results in what’s called a ‘call for service,’ resulting in a field responder interaction.”

A company called Prepared created the system the 911 Center will use. Berry said the system will answer nonemergency calls and often handle the calls from start to finish. It identifies itself as an automated attendant and routes calls to dispatchers if the callers ask for that, if it identifies the call as being an incident in-progress or if it does not understand the request.

If dispatchers are not busy, they can monitor the calls the system is handling and take over at any time, Berry said. Jefferson County already uses the system, he said, and surveys there indicate high levels of public satisfaction. Other centers have had improvements in employee morale.

“On average, agencies utilizing these types of systems have experienced about a 30% handling of administrative calls,” Berry said, “either completely or with minimal intervention from their dispatchers.”

The system has conditions and responses specific to Summit County programmed into the system, Berry said. It asks callers if they want to speak in Spanish, and if a caller speaks any of 33 languages, it will automatically respond in the language.

All calls will be recorded, Berry said, and they can be monitored in real-time and will be reviewed for efficacy. The system can send text messages to callers after they hang up with surveys to ask how they felt about the experience.

Commissioner Nina Waters said she could imagine people who are against automated answering systems being upset by the 911 Center’s system. Berry said his team is aware of that possibility, and the system has a way to handle it.

“Currently, we have 32 ‘intents,'” Berry said about the system’s programming. “Out of that, seven of them are specifically, ‘Just give me a person.'”

The commissioners voiced support for the 911 Center’s implementation plan.