Athens Clarke Probation supervises over 1,600 participants per month for a range of misdemeanor offenses. Their programs in both pretrial and probation require 8 employees and 17 probation officers to manage counseling, supervision and the collection of any money required by participants by the terms of their sentence. Dale Allen, Chief Probation Officer, has long been a proponent of leveraging new technology to advance and automate many of the repetitive and unnecessary tasks his team completes on a daily basis. In 2015, Dale contacted FivePoint Payments to ask if a custom solution existed to help him create efficiency is in his office.
The Goals
- Automate the check in process.
- Help officers efficiently manage arrivals.
- Reduce lobby wait times.
- Reduce clerk interactions and repurpose staff.
- Allow participants to answer common questions and provide relevant documents.
- Give low risk offenders the ability to check in and make payments without an officer visit.
Our Solution
FivePoint custom built an application that would be powered by a kiosk which would allow participants to check themselves in upon arriving at the Probation Office. Participants would use their case ID to find their profile and a front facing camera would snap a picture to alert the probation officer they had arrived. The participant would be walked through a series of common questions to better inform the probation officer of any potential violations to their probation. Additionally, participants could drop off any relevant documents required for supervision. The back-office software would queue each participant and alert officers of new arrivals. Should an officer be unable to visit with a waiting participant, a different officer could accept the participant to help keep the lobby empty.
The Result
With the help of the kiosk and new software, lobby wait times were cut reduced by 75%, officers were no longer wasting valuable time walking back and forth from their office to check for participants and office management was able to repurpose 2 full time employees to other more important tasks.
- Lobby wait times have been reduced from as high as 30 minutes to under 10 minutes on average.
- Realized efficiencies have allowed 2 full time employees to be repurposed.
The Bottom Line
TESS software and the FivePoint Payments kiosk are a perfect fit for any court office looking to increase efficiency and reduce unnecessary clerical interaction. Agencies who adopt the technology can expect a reduction in lobby wait times, elimination of clerical entries and an all around more efficient staff.
