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 Convergys servers to call defendants three days in advance of their traffic court appearances. The system, dubbed the Court Appearance Reminder System or CARS, 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 Convergys 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 unsuccessul, and if answered whether the call was answered by a person or a voicemail system. GC Services uses this information to update the defedants's account history in their collections database.

This application also updates a reporting database on the IntegraVox website, so that the Court's internal users can go to the IntegraVox website to 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. This sample graph shows the cummulative results for this system from March, 2009 through May, 2010.

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 critcal to the Court's continued operation.