About
Hamilton County 911 is the consolidated emergency communications district serving nearly 380,000 residents across 542 square miles in southeastern Tennessee. Formed in 2009, the district brings six law enforcement agencies, multiple municipal and volunteer fire departments, and a countywide EMS system together under one operational umbrella.
Challenge
Back-to-Back Calls Across Six Agencies Left Dispatchers Without Recovery Time
Hamilton County 911 has a strong training program and experienced telecommunicators under Director Barbara Jean. Still, the staffing environment made daily call handling increasingly demanding.
The center handles approximately 30,000 non-emergency calls each month. Authorized for 137 telecommunicators but staffed with about 93, this meant every shift carried a heavier load than it was built for.
The center also supports several law enforcement, fire, and EMS departments, each with unique non-emergency processes. This added another layer of complexity for dispatchers already working in a tight staffing environment.
With such a high volume of back-to-back calls, dispatchers were constantly switching context between emergencies and routine inquiries. It wasn’t unusual to give CPR instructions in one ring, then jump to a parking complaint in the next call.
Sustained across a shift, this pace and constant context-switching created substantial cumulative stress for her team, leaving them with very little margin for anything beyond immediate call handling. As Barbara explains, “There’s no recoil time and no time to mentally process calls.”
To better support dispatchers while maintaining service quality, Barbara and her leadership team pursued many traditional levers to keep pace with rising call volume: broadening recruiting, revising hiring benchmarks, and adjusting onboarding.
These adjustments did result in new hires, which in turn introduced new obstacles as each new dispatcher required months of development before they could support the floor. This created a training bottleneck, leading to a temporary hiring freeze to work through the backlog and get trainees fully operational.
Supervisors’ time was overwhelmingly focused on onboarding, as well as shift management, telecommunicator coaching through difficult calls, and handling overflow during peak volume. This limited the supervisors’ capacity for higher-level operational improvements like call-flow development and workflow optimization.
Hamilton needed a quick solution to ease non-emergency call volume and return time to team members, all without compromising service or adding new tasks to an already full workload.
Around this time, Barbara discovered Aurelian at the NENA 2024 conference. After learning that Aurelian’s AI voice assistant could automate non-emergency call handling while integrating directly with her CAD system, she was eager to explore further.
Solution
Automated Call Handling Reduces Team Stress
Once the go-live date was set, Aurelian shifted straight into integration. After connecting the platform to Hamilton’s CAD system, the Aurelian team collected the county’s non-emergency response types and question sets. They also met with each department to understand how they handled routine requests.
Those nuances were then built directly into automated call flows. Using logic trees for various call types and whitelists to protect sensitive situations, Aurelian ensured that high-risk calls would always route to a live dispatcher.
The team also handled all back-end configuration, testing, and refinement based on Hamilton County's existing procedures, helping Barbara focus on preparing her staff for the change.
Today, Aurelian’s AI voice assistant handles non-emergency calls (like parking issues, abandoned vehicles, noise complaints) autonomously the moment they come in. After gathering caller information using natural conversation and the same SOPs dispatchers follow, Aurelian validates locations using existing GIS data and creates calls for service directly in Hamilton’s CAD.
This automation keeps telecommunicators available for emergency calls that require immediate human judgment and critical thinking, while eliminating the constant mental switching between low-acuity administrative requests and high-stakes emergency situations.
The assistant monitors every conversation for emergent keywords, so at any indication of risk—like mentions of weapons, active injuries, chest pain, or breathing difficulties—the caller is promptly routed to a live dispatcher.
Supervisors also monitor calls in real time through the Aurelian dashboard, reviewing transcripts and audio when needed, just as they would with a dispatcher. The handoff into CAD gives the team a complete record of each interaction, and the automated surveys sent to callers provide ongoing quality feedback.
Beyond improving daily operations, this automation supports Hamilton County’s training pipeline. With Aurelian absorbing routine calls, supervisors can step away from constant floor coverage to mentor new hires, conduct focused training sessions, and refine onboarding processes—critical work that was previously difficult to prioritize when every staff member was needed on active calls.
From the earliest days of deployment, Aurelian followed Hamilton County's established protocols for every call. Callers receive a consistent, professional experience no matter how busy things get—while dispatchers gain critical recovery time for high-priority situations.
Results
Over 4,000 Calls Automated With Aurelian in the First Week of Deployment
What began as a way to ease the pressure on Hamilton’s dispatch team has become an indispensable part of daily operations. Aurelian now absorbs a significant portion of Hamilton County’s non-emergency volume, returning time to dispatchers and giving the center breathing room—even during their busiest hours.
The operational gains are evident in the data:
Hamilton County plans to expand the call types handled by Aurelian as performance continues to hold steady. The center sees automation as a way to support training classes—giving new hires the space to learn without the constant volume pressure experienced telecommunicators once faced—and manage future increases in non-emergency volume without adding pressure to the floor.
