NICE News Special Edition - Volume 2, Issue 8

	JIM PARK UPDATE MONTEREY COUNTY TELECOMMUNICATOR OF THE YEAR: LISA CADDY SCORES ATTEND INSIGHT 2006 ERIE COUNTY NICE IN THE NEWS SHARE YOUR "NICE" STORY: WIN AN IPOD PUBLIC SAFETY RESOURCE CENTER NICE EVENTS




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MONTEREY COUNTY RAISES THE BAR ON RELIABILITY, QUALITY ASSURANCE WITH NICE

The Monterey County (CA) Emergency Communications Department (ECD) has selected a NICE solution to capture and analyze emergency radio and 9-1-1 interactions in its consolidated 9-1-1 center located in Salinas, California. The County’s NICE solution, which will replace a Dictaphone Freedom® recording system, will combine the NiceLog® capture platform with NICE quality assurance software.

Lynn Diebold, director of the Monterey County Emergency Communications Department, said NICE was selected for a number of reasons. "Our choice came down to a combination of reliability, reputation, and ease of use," said Diebold. "NICE met or exceeded all of our requirements and ‘nice to haves.’ We’re getting absolutely everything that we wanted and, in some cases, more," she added.

Built in 2004, Monterey County’s state-of-the-art emergency center serves a diverse population of more than 425,000 people, spread across an equally diverse geographic landscape of cities (the largest being the City of Salinas) and pristine Pacific coastline, ranching and farming communities. The Department handles more than 600,000 police, fire and medical calls each year, dispatching for 31 different agencies that respond to calls for emergency service within the County’s 3300 square mile area.

A second entity, Westmed Ambulance, recently co-located with the County’s 9-1-1 Dispatch operation in the 14,000 square-foot facility, when it was contracted to provide EMD (Emergency Medical Dispatch) and ambulance service for the County. According to Diebold, this development was also factored into the decision to upgrade the County’s communications capture solution. "We needed more capacity to record these positions, so we partnered to acquire a NICE solution that would satisfy all of our needs," she explained.

According to Diebold, another ongoing challenge for Monterey County is recruiting, hiring and training dispatchers. Toward that end, the County invested in NICE’s quality assurance software to review and evaluate its 65 communications dispatchers and help fine tune their call handling skills.

"We are in the process of implementing a quality assurance (QA) initiative for our EMD, fire and law enforcement calls," explained Diebold. "Our NICE quality assurance solution will give us the flexibility to review, score and evaluate all of these different types of calls, so we can improve the consistency of our training and raise the bar on how we do business."

Diebold also pointed out that one additional benefit of the County’s new NICE solution is its ability to deliver insight from interactions by capturing and analyzing radio data from the County’s radio system. "With NICE, we’ll have the capability to track how busy our radio channels are, and analyze these utilization levels, so we can plan ahead to split frequencies or add resources when necessary," she said.

Read More about the Monterey County Emergency Communications Department at www.co.monterey.ca.us/911/home.htm.

Read More about NICE’s solutions for public safety at www.nice.com/solutions/public/first_responder.php.