AWS Public Sector Blog
How the City of Virginia Beach modernized its emergency and citizen services with Amazon Connect
At the City of Virginia Beach’s Emergency Communications and Citizen Services (ECCS) department, the phone never stops ringing. The contact center handles more than 200,000 emergency calls and another 350,000 administrative calls each year—most of which are related to routine issues, such as evictions, towing requests, and lost pets. The same dispatchers responding to life-threatening emergencies also manage non-urgent inquiries. With ECCS’s automated functions, limited in capability, the result was long wait times for frustrated citizens and added strain to an already demanding work environment.
To address this challenge, the City of Virginia Beach worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to modernize its ECCS using Amazon Connect, introducing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that help serve citizens faster and reduce dispatcher workloads.
Managing 911 and 311 calls with limited automation capabilities
Serving a resident population of 450,000 that more than doubles in summer, Virginia Beach is dynamic and complex. ECCS manages the city’s 911 emergency operations and 311 information lines, acting as the main communication hub for the public.
Before modernizing, the city’s traditional interactive voice response (IVR) system provided a very limited scope of options to assist people. Callers were met with a menu of the basics—press one for police, press two for animal control—with no opportunity to describe their specific needs. This structure meant the same 911 dispatchers responsible for emergencies were often juggling those calls with a flood of incoming non-emergency requests, contributing to burnout in an already high-stress role.
City leaders recognized the need to automate information sharing for routine requests, reduce the workload for dispatchers, and enhance the citizen experience through faster and more reliable access to information.
“The challenges we were facing are challenges that impact the entire public safety and emergency communications space. Critical incident stress is intense and something that we must be careful to manage to retain good people,” said Josh Nelson, IT solutions manager for the City of Virginia Beach. “So, by reducing one element of their work, they can focus on the more mission-critical priority of incoming emergencies. It helps improve stress, and it reduces wait times for the public.”
Partnering with AWS to deploy an intelligent cloud contact center
After learning of a nearby city’s success with non-emergency upgrades, Virginia Beach recognized that modernizing its own system would reduce non-emergency call volume, boost agent efficiency, and offer citizens faster access to information.
Planning began in November 2023 with a team comprising members from both the ECCS and the city’s IT department. Together, they set a goal to deploy an intelligent, cloud-based system that could understand natural language, automate common requests, and seamlessly connect citizens to the right services. By February 2024, Virginia Beach—which already had a working relationship with AWS—engaged with AWS directly to implement Amazon Connect as the foundation of its new contact center. “We knew we wanted to be able to maintain and manage the systems ourselves, and AWS did a great job of training us on how to do just that,” said Nelson.
The project advanced quickly. During a two-week pilot phase, the team routed all calls to a single queue and collected real-world data about the purpose of every call. “We were able to really hone in on what our callers were telling us. That type of tool is something we’d never had in our history,” noted Nelson. “Getting that information right at the point of inception was pretty wild.”
Armed with these insights, the team developed smarter workflows and deployed them in April 2024—just two months later. “The Amazon Connect technology, with its natural language processing, machine learning, and the ability to incorporate AI, combined with the support we got from AWS, allowed for such a speedy implementation,” said Nelson.
Connecting citizens to the right services with Amazon Connect and AI
The citizen-facing side of the platform in the new system uses natural language processing to let callers describe their specific needs to the AI agent. For instance, a resident reporting a lost dog or asking about the eviction process can be quickly directed to the right department or receive an automated text with relevant information, all with near-zero wait time.
Several AWS services work together to deliver this experience to Virginia Beach citizens:
- Amazon Connect serves as the core of the system, managing call flows and workflows.
- Amazon Lex enables the system to understand caller requests through speech recognition and intent classification.
- Amazon Bedrock powers the Q&A capability that summarizes information from FAQ documents.
- Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns/AWS End User Messaging supports outbound SMS messaging, sending citizens links or additional information directly to their phones.
Enhancing citizen experience while reducing dispatcher workload
Since going live in April 2024, approximately 45 percent of non-emergency contacts are now being resolved without reaching a live agent. This equates to roughly the equivalent of six full-time employees’ worth of work. Service quality and employee experience have improved significantly as well, delivering measurable improvements in both citizen service and staff efficiency.
Improved citizen service:
- Reduced call wait times: Citizens receive faster, automated responses for common requests.
- Immediate and 24/7 access to information: Residents can quickly find answers to frequently asked questions at any time.
- Consistent, accurate information delivery: Every citizen receives up-to-date responses across all channels.
Enhanced staff and operational efficiency:
- Improved emergency prioritization: Dispatchers can focus on high-priority calls rather than administrative inquiries.
- Higher agent satisfaction: Call takers report less stress and greater capacity to manage true emergencies.
- Greater overall productivity: By automating routine inquiries, ECCS can handle higher call volumes and respond more quickly during peak periods.
Expanding AI automation and exploring new use cases
Following its successful deployment, Virginia Beach is exploring ways to build on Amazon Connect and expand its use of AI-powered automation. “We really want to put more into Amazon Bedrock’s hands. We want AI agents to manage and process more incoming calls, gather information, and connect seamlessly with our systems,” said Nelson. “And as AI continues to develop at a breakneck pace, we now have the space to expand and derive even more value.”
Among the city’s priorities: automating workflows that currently require substantial staff time, such as towing requests, repossessions, and vehicle inquiries. Virginia Beach also plans to expand Amazon Connect across its website and other communication channels, creating an omnichannel public information hub that serves citizens through voice, web, and messaging platforms.
This trajectory—from pilot to deployment to expansion—demonstrates how Amazon Connect and AI services, such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Lex, can help state and local governments streamline citizen engagement while reducing pressure on critical staff and enhancing public satisfaction.
Explore more ways Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Connect can help government agencies modernize citizen services.
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