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NSW Police Service
NSW Police Assistance Line a boost for fighting crime
The Police Service's charter is to reduce crime, violence and fear in the community, and historically the NSW Police Service has had a duty to respond in person to all reported crimes. Some 80 per cent of these reported incidents - such as vandalism, minor theft and motor vehicle collisions not involving injuries - are relatively non-urgent. The attendance at the site of these minor incidents, and the associated administrative tasks, was considerably reducing the resources available to combat serious crime such as assault and murder.
The NSW Police Service chose Fujitsu Australia as its partner in implementing an e-services solution that would allow the more effective use of finite resources, such as availability of police officers. Fujitsu was awarded the contract to provide the hardware and software infrastructure for a new call centre.
The result is the Police Assistance Line (PAL), a centralised call centre that handles the reporting and documenting of minor incidents. PAL provides the public with a more convenient method of reporting incidents than visiting a police station, and the efficiencies of the new system have a resulted in much improved response times.
PAL handles non-urgent incidents that are not actually happening at the time of the call. These include cases where the probability of solving the crime is small, where no-one is injured or unduly traumatised, and where the person reporting the incident is prepared to report it over the phone.
As the call centre is staffed by specially-trained operators rather than sworn officers, the cost of logging a minor incident is far less than that of sending a police officer to the scene of the incident. As a result, many police officers have been freed to concentrate on major incidents - with significant savings.
While PAL is based in a purpose-built environment at Tuggerah on the NSW Central Coast, an existing call centre at Lithgow has been maintained as a secondary site to handle the expected call loads. In early 2000 both call centres began operating as one virtual call centre, and they now receive more than 2,000 calls per day.
PAL was a significant integration project staged in two phases, managed and implemented by Fujitsu. Phase one involved the establishment of the call centre and the design, installation and integration of the supporting IT Infrastructure. This included Lucent G3R PABX equipment, Genesys CTI software, VeCommerce Gulliver IVR, and the Nice Voice logging product. Fujitsu 42in plasma displays were installed to provide operators with constant feedback on the status of operations.
Phase two involved the implementation of PeopleSoft's Vantive Support CRM solution - integrated with a fax server - to further extend PAL's capabilities.
Other activities included project management, hardware installation, system analysis and integration, software development, testing and implementation, and documentation.
PAL has achieved all its targets since its first day of operation. It has been recognised for excellence in the teleservices and call centre industry, and in 2000 was awarded both the NSW and National Greenfield Teleservices site of the year by the Australian Teleservices Association.
