Prescient vision

Marx's vision turned out to prescient, because the region experienced all sorts of travails in the aftermath of Sandy, including power outages, communication system failures and impassable roads. Even if the roadways had been passable, many of New Jersey 911's staffers wouldn't have been able to reach the center, because the region ran out of gasoline.

However, because the agency had deployed a cloud-based call-center solution provided by San Ramon, Calif.-based Five9 — dubbed Virtual Contact Center — it was able to route incoming calls not only to its home-bound staffers, but also to multiple 211 centers, including two as far away as Houston and Palm Beach, Fla.

"We actually ended up directing calls after the hurricane to seven different locations at one time," Marx said. "We had 79,000 calls that came in over a six-week period. We were able to keep up for a few hours once the storm hit, but we knew very soon that we were going to need help.

"We could change the percentage routing at any given time and we did that for weeks," she added. "There is no way that we could have done this without a cloud-based solution."

In this regard, the solution acts as a "match-maker," according to Dan Burkland, Five9's senior vice president of enterprise sales and business development.

"We intercept in-bound calls in our data center, which knows the status of every answering resource, whether they're sitting at home, in a formalized call center at New Jersey 211, or at another agency that is allowed to take calls for them," he explained. "We can see each and every agent that's locked into the system and see their status, and we have a hard connection between that agent and our platform.

"So, when a call hits our platform, we can determine who is the best, optimal resource right now to handle this call."

Marx agreed that this is a crucial capability and added that the beauty of the platform is that other centers don't have to be Five9 customers in order to pitch in.

"In fact, we actually let Vermont just sign into our system and they answered our voice mails," she said. "They took 100% control of it — we never even had to look at them."

Marx added that another key capability is the ability to transmit pre-scripted messages, which proved invaluable in Sandy's aftermath.

"After the hurricane, there was a social-media rumor that FEMA was giving out $2,000 food vouchers. So, people were calling FEMA fast and furious, and FEMA was telling them that the rumor wasn't true. They also were telling them to call 211 because 'they'll help you with food,'" Marx said. "In a period of six days, we got 30,000 calls just about disaster food stamps and food vouchers."

To deal with the sudden avalanche of calls, New Jersey 211 set up a pre-recorded message that explained the rumor was untrue. More important, the caller was given an opportunity to leave a message if they wanted to be contacted should food stamps and vouchers become available in the state,   and directed them to a website where they could get more information.

"That was really crucial in terms of handling the rumor-control piece," Marx said. "It was unexpected, but we had to react immediately — and there was no way that we were going to be able to handle 30,000 calls in [six] days."