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3-1-1 Customer Service Rep C...
3-1-1 Customer Service Rep Connected People with Help: 'It Was Important to Me to Be Here'
For most of a week, Ryan Noles lived, breathed and was immersed in the snowstorm. He couldn’t get away from it.
Not that he had any intention otherwise.
To assure he could get to the 3-1-1 Center for Service Innovation to staff the phones, Noles stayed at a downtown hotel a few blocks away from the office.
When he wasn’t assisting people in need – calming them, reassuring them, connecting them to resources – he was sleeping, and waiting for his next shift.
“At least at the very beginning, a lot of information was coming out all at once,” says Noles, a 3-1-1 customer service representative for about 2 ½ years.
“It was important to me to be here when we opened at 7 a.m. People needed to have direct communication with the City, and to be able to get reliable information and help.”
Noles represents the 3-1-1 Center as a member of the Local Emergency Planning Committee. And he supports the Emergency Operations Center when it’s activated.
Many snowstorm calls to 3-1-1, predictably, were requests for snow removal. But some were more urgent: People who were snowed in needed help getting to their dialysis centers – or they needed a ride to get to a warming center.
“Many calls had the potential to become medical emergencies, if we hadn’t been proactive,” Noles says.
For two weeks, 3-1-1 went from a normal average of 600 calls a day to nearly 1,200 a day. One day, 1,631 calls were answered.
The average wait time before a call was answered during the snowstorm? 47 seconds.
Posted by
evreeland
On 08 February, 2024 at 7:56 AM
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