Perception of VOIP 9-1-1 Access Fatal

Customers of VOIP phone services are supposed to alert their service provider if they move, so the instructions can be changed for emergency services responding to a 911 call.

But that doesn’t mean the company is off the hook. A family in Calgary lost their 18-month-old son after ambulance crews were dispatched to an old address.

The parents thought their address changes had been processed, since the company sent a bill to the right house every month. What they didn’t know was that the database of addresses for 911 calls was separate from the company’s billing addresses.

I’m willing to a lot of customers make the same assumption.

“I hope they go back into the whole setup, look at their procedures and see where they need to improve,” a family friend told the Globe and Mail, about the communications company’s 911 processes.

Designing a customer service website seems pretty dull, until you consider that lives might be at stake if the instructions aren’t clear. Can someone who doesn’t understand the underlying technology figure out that 911 service is handled differently? Could someone understand the instructions even if they aren’t very good at the language being used?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you have work to do.

Photo by Rob!, used under a Creative Commons attribution licence.