Los Angeles County

Los Angeles Superior Court Cuts Traffic Court Failure to Appear Rates by 20%

Working with the Court's Revenue Enhancement Group, IntegraVox developed an outbound application that runs on the Court's existing InterVoice servers to call defendants three days in advance of their traffic court appearances. The system makes an average of 700 calls per night.

The defendant phone numbers, traffic case numbers, court appearance dates and times come from a file that the Court's collection agency, GC Services, sends daily to the IntegraVox FTP site. The InterVoice voice response system picks up this file daily and initiates the outbound contacts. At the conclusion of the daily outbound campaign, the IVR system sends a results file to GC Services showing the status of each defendant contact (e.g. whether successful or unsuccessful, and if answered whether the call was answered by a person or a voicemail system. GC Services uses this information to update the defendant's account history in their collections database.

This application also updates a reporting database on the IntegrVox website, so that the Court's internal users can pull up detailed outbound contact information for a particular nightly campaign, or for a specified range of dates. This application uses Microsoft's SQL Reporting Services to generate these activity reports and graphs.

Since the system went live at the end of March, 2009, traffic court failure to appear rates have declined 20% resulting in significant operational cost savings for Los Angeles Superior Court at a time when cost savings are critical to the Court's continued operation.  The system, dubbed the Court Appearance Reminder System or CARS, has been nominated for the 2009 Los Angeles County Productivity and Quality award.