Recent weather events, such as earthquakes, floods, and fires remind organizations that they need an effective way of reaching employees with status updates and instructions on what actions to take during an emergency. This requires that every organization include in its disaster recovery plan an automated way to reach out to its employees. Organizations can deploy automated outreach through hosted providers, such as MIR3, SoundBite and Varolii and several other providers. Recent improvements in IVRs or Voice Portals (VP) now provide organizations an effective in-house solution to send automated notifications across multiple channels. Since some communication channels may fail during emergency situations, it is best to send notifications to more than one address or number including the telephone, email, mobile device and social network sites to ensure receipt. Leading premise solutions for outbound VP multichannel notification applications include Avaya, ALU Genesys and Voxeo.
There are several best practices to follow when developing an outbound emergency notification process. These include the following;
• Customize messages based on different classes of employees. For example managers may require more detailed messages and a request for a call back when messages are sent.
• Reach out to multiple devices simultaneously. Allow the system to send outbound messages to all appropriate channels based on an employee’s profile.
• Enable speech response rather than DTMF commands. This makes it easier for a recipient to interact with the system and acknowledge the message was received.
• Continuously update employee’s contact data. This should include current contact information, such as mobile number, home phone number, email address, Twitter name, etc.
• Ensure messages can be modified remotely. With this capability an administrator can update messages easily from any location.
• Pretest system prior to an emergency launch. This is essential to determine success rate for outbound message receipt.
The technology exists to make employee emergency notifications simple and secure. Regardless if organizations want a hosted solution or develop a voice portal solution in-house, procedures need to be in place to support customized, relevant and instructive messages for all employees during an emergency situation.