TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Improving Soldier Morale Takes a Call from Home

Dennis McCafferty | Date: 12-16-09 | Comments

Improved speech recognition technology allows soldiers in the field to automate their phone calls back home, giving the troops faster, more accurate service and helping improve military morale by better connecting our troops with their loved ones.

With endless days spent avoiding IED-triggered blasts in Iraq or seeking out Taliban-backed terrorists in Afghanistan, women and men serving our country overseas look forward to staying connected with loved ones at home. But the periodically authorized phone calls to them can be a burden on telecommunications operations.

Without advanced technology, each call has to be connected, authorized, timed and then disconnected when the authorized time expires. Multiply that process by millions of calls and you'll easily tie up a large team of operators at each home base. Morale calls are typically only 15 minutes long, so delays and dropped signals can make for a disheartening experience for soldiers when they most need a lift.

The frustrations have stemmed from a traditional system in which soldiers use tactical telephones with keypads that generate tones that cannot be recognized by standard touch-tone systems.

"That means that soldiers had to call into a board, be forwarded to the states, get transferred to an operator, then finally get connected for their morale call," says Murray Meizlish, telecommunications site manager for Fort Stewart/Hunter Army Airfield, home to the 3rd Infantry Division, aka the "Iron Fist of the XVII Airborne Corps." "It was a cumbersome, tedious process�one that required a generous staffing of operators at the base, especially during wartime deployments."

But a new system called Smart Speech Morale Call Manager from Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Amcom Software taps speech recognition technology to automate these morale calls, providing faster, more accurate service.

Integrated directly into the existing Fort Stewart directory system, it allows soldiers to avoid operators and touch-tones entirely by speaking directly into an automated line. They only need to provide to the system the phone number of the one they're trying to reach. The Amcom system accepts spoken commands, then routes and connects the call, and alerts the caller when the set time is about to end before the call is automatically disconnected.

"Before, an operator had to stand by, time each call and disconnect it in 15 minutes," Meizlish says. "Now the system automatically breaks in with a message saying the call will end in 30 seconds." This not only reduces the need for an operator, but it gives a soldier time to say goodbye.

The system handled more than 55,000 calls during its first six weeks of operation and has maintained that pace since.

Amcom is also establishing itself as a communications solution provider to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, as the VA seeks better ways to run its call centers. At the hospitals, fully staffed call centers are often unable to handle the volume of phone calls during peak periods.

Additionally, they have implemented call center technologies that aren't integrated, such as group paging, directory services and on-call schedules. Disparate systems typically strain operators' bandwidth further, resulting in long call times and inconsistent methods of tracking on-call schedules. So Amcom is providing integrated product packages that operators can access through a single screen, accelerating response times and improving caller satisfaction. So far, more than 15 VA hospitals are using the Amcom technology.

"VA customers say our systems provide the foundation required for sending critical messages to nurses and physicians and rallying the right people to speed patient care," says Chris Heim, Amcom CEO. "This allows them to better manage their resources."