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."
