Blog: City Blog

3-1-1 Customer Service Rep Connected People with Help: 'It Was Important to Me to Be Here'

For most of a week, Ryan Noles lived, breathed and was immersed in the snowstorm. He couldn’t get away from it.

Not that he had any intention otherwise.

To assure he could get to the 3-1-1 Center for Service Innovation to staff the phones, Noles stayed at a downtown hotel a few blocks away from the office.

When he wasn’t assisting people in need – calming them, reassuring them, connecting them to resources – he was sleeping, and waiting for his next shift.

“At least at the very beginning, a lot of information was coming out all at once,” says Noles, a 3-1-1 customer service representative for about 2 ½ years.

“It was important to me to be here when we opened at 7 a.m. People needed to have direct communication with the City, and to be able to get reliable information and help.”

Ryan Noles, one of the 3-1-1 Customer Service Representatives who connected residents with resources during the January 2024 snowstorm.

Ryan Noles, one of the 3-1-1 Customer Service Representatives who connected residents with resources during the January 2024 snowstorm.

Noles represents the 3-1-1 Center as a member of the Local Emergency Planning Committee. And he supports the Emergency Operations Center when it’s activated.

Many snowstorm calls to 3-1-1, predictably, were requests for snow removal. But some were more urgent: People who were snowed in needed help getting to their dialysis centers – or they needed a ride to get to a warming center.

“Many calls had the potential to become medical emergencies, if we hadn’t been proactive,” Noles says.

For two weeks, 3-1-1 went from a normal average of 600 calls a day to nearly 1,200 a day. One day, 1,631 calls were answered.

The average wait time before a call was answered during the snowstorm? 47 seconds.

Posted by evreeland On 08 February, 2024 at 7:56 AM