Automating QA gave them faster coaching, less burnout, and a process their team actually trusts.
"We went from QAing very few calls to doing 100%."
— Debra Smith, Floor Manager, St. John's County 911
Ask any 911 center director what their QA process looks like and you'll get one of two answers. Either they have someone dedicated to it, burning through call after call manually, pulling recordings, pausing, listening, and scoring over and over again. Or they'll tell you honestly that QA is the thing that falls through the cracks when everything else is on fire.
St. John's County 911 in St. Augustine, Florida was in that first camp. A dedicated QA person doing everything by hand, one call at a time, 20 to 30 minutes per review. Out of 364,000 calls handled last year—101,000 of them 911—they were reviewing about 2%. And even that was enough to burn someone out completely.
St. John's leadership had already started looking at Axon 911, by Prepared as a way to fix the process. When their QA person left, that decision became urgent. QA landed on Debra Smith, a floor manager for whom QA is a collateral duty, not her primary role. She inherited a half-built system, no playbook, and a center that needed a process it could actually sustain.
"QA happens to be my collateral duty, and I'm very happy it has been because this has been a fantastic experience for me."
— Debra Smith, Floor Manager, St. John's County 911
The Challenge
- Out of 101,000 911 annual calls, about 2% were ever reviewed due to time and resource constraints
- Manual QA took 20 to 30 minutes per call: pull the recording, listen in real time, pause, score, repeat, with no transcription and no automation
- One person was carrying the entire workload with no support structure around her
- When she left, the program stalled. The work still needed to happen. The capacity wasn't there.
The Solution
St. John's implemented Automated QA + Training from Axon 911 Intelligence, by Prepared. Now, every call gets automatically reviewed and failures surface immediately.
And not just after the fact: managers keep AQA up during shifts and catch issues while calls are still in progress, before they ever hit the QA queue.
Debra and her team now split the manual review of failing calls, defined as anything scoring below 90%. They follow the same SOPs, score consistently, and trust what the system surfaces. When the auto score and manual score align, which they do within 3%, they move on.
The Results
The numbers tell part of the story. In the past 90 days, St. John’s QA’d 4,928 calls, including 100% coverage of failing calls.
Time spent on manual review is down 90%. On one recent weekend, Debbie had about 120 failing calls to work through. That took her roughly 3 hours. The same volume done manually would have taken closer to 30 hours.
But the bigger shift is what Axon 911 Intelligence, by Prepared, is making possible across the team. When a learning opportunity surfaces, managers pull the call taker in, play the call, and walk through it together. Coaching happens within days of the incident, not weeks later when the moment is gone.
The team receives it that way too. St. John's has a strong floor culture: call takers push back when they disagree, file disputes, and engage with the process. That's only possible because the scoring is consistent and the feedback is clear.
"I trust the scoring a lot more than I did when we first started."
— Debra Smith, Floor Manager, St. John's County 911
For a center that went from reviewing about 2% of calls to 100%, the cultural shift has been just as significant as the operational one. Call takers know every call is being reviewed consistently and fairly. Managers aren't guessing anymore.
Most 911 centers aren't starting from zero on QA. They're starting from exhaustion, one person doing too much manually, a sample too small to mean anything, and a process that burns people out before it gets better. St. John's didn't overhaul their center. They fixed the part that was breaking everyone, and let their people do the rest.
“The whole team has been amazing. I cannot speak highly enough of Prepared. It's just been wonderful to have you guys dial in and really invest in our agency and in what we're doing.”
— Debra Smith, Floor Manager, St. John's County 911
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