Brad Carico of the Caldwell Fire Department in Caldwell, ID has worked with FIREHOUSE software for quite a few years.  In that time, he's refined the processes within his department to include many auto-tasks and to collect data for many different purposes.  When someone in the department has a data collection need, Brad is able to respond by defining the problem and then creating a solution within FIREHOUSE. In the previous issue, we discussed Brad's use of auto-tasks to e-mail reports to department members and how his department used FH to automate payroll entry. In this issue, we'll discuss another use for FH.

As part of his executive fire officer program at the National Fire Academy, Brad's Chief had completed a paper on providing customer service to the taxpayers of Caldwell. As part of this paper, his Chief had developed a customer satisfaction survey. His Chief asked if the survey could be incorporated into the Firehouse database.  They defined a process so that a survey would be sent to the people involved in any of the department's EMS or fire calls in any given month. The survey's would be printed at the first of the month with an automated task and then mailed out by office staff.  Returned questionnaires are first reviewed by the Chief.  Then, questionnaire data for a call is entered into the NFIRS incident report in the Involvements module using a series of user fields.  For EMS calls, the respondents are entered simply as "EMS customer", so as not to violate HIPPA. 

Once the process was established, the fields and rules that allowed the data entry to be done in a timely and secure manner were built and the data entry was started.

Now reports are run each month, as part of the Department's automated monthly statistics report, to include the high, low, and average scores for each customer service category. The comments for the previous month are included to give feedback on the Department's customer service. This monthly report is sent to every member of the Department, through another automated task, so the crews can see what is being said about the service they are providing to customers.  Soon, the department plans to begin a survey program for all prevention division inspections and enter those metrics into FH. 

Since the inception of the survey program, the Department has received a lot of positive feedback but the surveys have also helped identify areas that needed addressed. In some cases, the problems involved personnel from the county ambulance district. Often customers think that all personnel are from the same agency.  The use of the questionnaires has enabled the ambulance district to get feedback from Caldwell Fire as the questionnaires are also passed on to them so that any problems can be addressed.

All in all, Brad has configured his system in a way that works for his teams. While you may not have the 300 active automated tasks he does, after you try some of his ideas, the use of these modifications to the basic FH system could provide your group with some of the same efficiency improvements.