Allocating and splitting switchboard crews by urgency of calls

Of all the calls made by Israelis to police emergency switchboards no more than 18% are genuinely urgent. The remainder are either requests for information or nuisance calls. Nonetheless, under the current system, all operators deal with all types of calls that are taken in FIFO order: that is, giving each call equal priority. But since callers in fact want different sorts of service of varying levels of urgency, applying FIFO order means that genuinely urgent calls may have to wait too long before being answered. One solution to the problem is to classify calls by urgency level and to allocate more operators to the urgent group. Response to urgent calls is thus improved at the expense of the less urgent ones. The study presented here examines the possibility and value of splitting a switchboard (SWB) and its operator team into two, for urgent and for non-urgent calls, and describes a model developed for calculating the proportion of the total operator team required for each of the two SWBs. The study also clarifies the relation between the urgency of calls and operators´ level of occupation.