United Way of Metro Atlanta offers serious commitment to their customers to maintain full satisfaction and ensure that all individuals have the opportunity to thrive and be part of a prospering community. The United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta was the first to introduce a 2-1-1 service in 1997. 2-1-1 is completely operated by private non-profit community-service organizations. The organization offers variety of informational services that ranges from debt counseling and financial assistance to emergency food and homeless services.
We are a committed team of GATECH students that will work closely with 211 United Way of Greater Atlanta to help them reach their optimal goal to provide the best services to the disadvantaged individuals of the community. Our team consists of Hamid Mohammadi, a master student in the program of Statistics; Richard Huckaby, a student in computer engineering, and myself, Fatheia Ahmeda; an Applied Mathematics student.
We set an appointment with Mr. Zubler, the director of the United Way 2-1-1 on the 20th of May where we met at the Atlanta main office. Mr Zubler gave us a brief introduction to the operation of his office that included a tour of the place. He was very helpful and patient in dealing with all our inquiries and he provided us with samples data that included records of day to day activities. The second day, Thursday 21, Hamid went back to the office and spent all his afternoon with the director to explore more data. As a first step in working and analyzing the data we have constructed a visualization diagram that displays the distribution of call volume for the top 20 counties in Georgia .
We are planning several approaches to work with the available data to minimize wait time for callers and optimize the Interactive Voice Response system (IVR) based on the analysis of the data. Automating the routine customer service interactions is the most realistic solution to solve the wait time issue. The automated voice menu will reduce the need for agents to handle the call manually and thus decrease the wait time by a considerable time.
Several critical pieces of data are disparate across different files which makes merging the data for analysis challenging. For example, the file that contains the duration for each call is separate from the one containing the origin/location of the call and there is no unique identifier to join the records from each file.
As a team we are excited to face the challenge and exert our best effort to finish our tasks.