On Monday June 9th, Communications Training Coordinator Danah DeVries Palmer had the singular honor of being one of the training instructors for the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) Conference this year. She chose as her topic “How to Create an Awesome Quality Assurance Customer Service Program”.
Danah has been described as a “caffeinated cheerleader”. She specializes in high energy presentations on several topics including customer service and tactical communication. She is, of course, also quite interested in following through with quality assurance measurements guaranteeing dispatcher success.
Danah has a very full life and found that she had several commitments the weekend prior to her Monday class as well as the rest of the week. Therefore, in typical Danah style, she flew out of Burbank Airport at 9 p.m. Sunday night and arrived in Tampa, Florida at 7:30 on Monday. Since her class was not scheduled until 2 p.m., this gave her an opportunity to enjoy a few hours of the conference. After her class, she was scheduled to leave Tampa at 5 p.m. but was delayed for several hours by area lightning storms. She finally arrived home at 1:30 the following (Tuesday) morning. Of course, she was at a 9-1-1 Group meeting at 9 a.m. that same morning!
Her course was described as follows: “Does your agency have great customer service skills? Do your dispatchers provide quality service to all their customers? The answer is probably “I think so”, but can you prove it? Could they be even better? This presentation will provide an overview of how to put together a program that will show off the skills of telecommunicators, provide training where needed and improve the service provided to our customers.”
Danah was pivotal in renovating Oxnard Police/Fire Communications' Quality Assurance Program and continues to administer it. She shared with those in attendance how it was developed and implemented as well as the documents used to record and track performance. She covered the Customer Service Surveys that are sent out to the public for feedback and how our quality assurance committee was formed from Communications employees. How to deal with remediation and discipline was also addressed. Danah is a big supporter of recognizing good performance and uses the quality assurance program to spotlight that as well.
There were several attendees who were ready to learn and eagerly accepted the handouts Danah had prepared. She has already heard from some of them who are enthusiastic about developing their own program. Congratulations Danah for sharing such an important aspect of what we do to maintain our excellent service!
