People usually initiate a call to an inbound call center for help when they encountered an emergency. For example, people would call 110 or 119 when they needed help in Taiwan. Some types of emergency such as natural disasters or accidents will bring many inbound calls in a short time, and some of these calls would be made to report the same situation as previous calls, and we call this kind of calls “duplicate calls.” Since call centers handle calls one by one, these duplicate calls would delay handling other emergency calls which report other unhandled situations. However, all different emergency calls should be handled as soon as possible to prevent the situations getting worse. In this paper, we propose a method and a corresponding system based on the police system to reach the goal. The system can determine which calls are more likely the calls that are made to report the same situation as previous calls and then reorder the queuing calls by priorities. This method can not only make a better use of the limited resources and make dispatchers able to coordinate necessary assistance for people as soon as possible.

We used expert interviews to gather the information about duplicate calls. The experts pointed out duplicate calls have a significant correlation with time, location, and case category. Emergency call center dispatchers particularly rely on location to determine whether a call reports the same situation or not. Therefore, at the beginning of the system process, the system analyzes the historical call data based on time, location, and case category, and calculate various statistics of duplicate calls. This system will activate the call reordering mechanism when it detected all dispatchers were busy for inbound calls. After activation, the system will determine the likelihood that the call would be a duplicate call after a new call arrived. The likelihood is determined by taking pieces of information into account, including the duplicate call statistics, the recent inbound calls, and the data which are retrieved from the caller with IVR (Interactive Voice Response). And then the system reorder the calls which have not been handled based on the duplicate probability and the data of blacklist and whitelist. The system will show a list of possible duplicate calls to dispatchers and make them easier to determine whether the call is a duplicate call or not. Showing the list is important for a call center which has many dispatchers because they could not know every previous call that was handled by other dispatchers. Finally, the call data will be added to historical data and make a more valuable statistics for handling next inbound calls.