Arlington describes non-emergency call diversion with opt-out and reporting-portal dependencies

Ask the communications director, emergency manager and service-portal owners which storm and administrative calls consume staff time. Determine whether callers can already complete those requests online and how exceptions reach a person. Offer a limited review of one non-emergency category with an accessible fallback. The value hypothesis is fewer avoidable call-taker interactions while preserving resolution quality. Arlington's historical comparison is a useful lead, not an independently measured return. Do not promise faster emergency response, annualized savings or equal benefits for another county. Qualify portal readiness, language needs and operating support before proposing a routing service.

Build a test route that recognizes a narrow intent and offers a verified destination while retaining immediate human escalation. Prerequisites include approved call examples, an operational reporting portal, telephony ownership and an agreed emergency exception policy. Test ambiguous storm descriptions, declined SMS, broken links, speech errors and cloud outages. Log transfer completion without excessive personal-data retention. Compare correct resolution and staff handling time with existing routing, not just the number of workflow interactions. Keep future knowledge-base agents outside the initial proof unless separately evaluated. The report lacks misrouting evidence, so adversarial and accessibility tests must precede live expansion.

Dispatch operations should own a staged pilot with portal teams and telephony IT. Baseline the selected category, review its utterances, configure exceptions and train call-takers to recover failed diversions. Dependencies include maintained public pages and support for callers who cannot use digital links. Approve each route before launch and review complaints, transfers and material service changes. Proposed acceptance includes independently checked routing accuracy, successful human fallback, measured completion and no unresolved critical misroutes in the agreed test set. These are proposed criteria. Track repeat calls and abandoned journeys so apparent call reduction does not conceal unmet needs.