Spamming via SMS

Posted by Dave Burr on January 2, 2016
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What is Spam? Well, we all know the definition, right? It is that gigantic slug of nonsense emails that you delete every day, leaving the one percent valuable stuff (which ultimately turns out the be more like a half a percent).

Broadly-interpreted, though, Spam is *any* unwanted message. And it can come to you via a variety of media, including landline telephone, social media, and (gulp) even via your own personal device that you carry everywhere, via telephone or even text.

What many people don’t always consider (occasionally even our own AMG Alerts customers),  is that when it comes to messaging personal devices, the Spam designation is highly contextual. When any message arrives at an inopportune time, it can be judged harshly. When the message has obvious benefit for the recipient, which the vast majority would, there is normally little issue. But what if, say, the president of the company decides, out of the blue, to send employees his “thought of the day”? How valuable is such a thing when you are driving, sitting down to dinner with your family, asleep, or engaged in some activity on your time and yours alone.

When access to the wireless network and device usage is paid for by the sender (the company), there are few restrictions. But wireless carriers are extremely sensitive to complaints by private account holders about “abuse”, and since the definition of that term for any individual can change from minute-to-minute, all messaging should have a certain level of scrutiny.

We counsel our customers to follow opt-in rules that we provide, which should include not only opt-out instructions,and other information, but an internal contact for questions about whatever mass-texting program you have in place. Our system provides tools for reminding employees that that the system is there (in cases where the use is infrequent) and allowing them to review their preferences and take themselves out if needed.

At the end of the day, there should be an understanding and a level of trust between the sender and the recipients about how the system will be used and what to expect. Keep an open channel with them about how the program is going, and definitely follow the “Do unto others” philosophy as it applies to message sending.

 

 

Oh, the Possibilities!: Employee Alert System Uses

Posted by Dave Burr on October 23, 2014
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Most of our would-be AMG Alerts customers come to us with a specific purpose in mind, often spurred on by a recent event. But when you consider the myriad uses for an employee notification system, it’s a wonder that any organization has survived without one — at least without a steady level of pain over a period of years.

Here are a few examples that are real-life. We see them every day:

  • Weather-related messaging. Okay, this is the granddaddy of them all but we have seen systems underutilized here
  • IT systems-related issues. This is the second most popular use. Employees are informed of email/phone/special information application outages and their resolutions
  • Calling in personnel to handle a shortfall
  • Calling off personnel – i.e. cancelling a shift
  • Road closings and other local events that might impede travel to (or away from) the facility
  • Security situations, not only the unlikely “active shooter” scenario, but more likely issues such as suspicious persons or police activity
  • Informing about what is NOT an emergency – i.e. explaining smoke, suspicious odors, emergency vehicles in proximity, loud noises in the area, etc. that have no impact on safety or security but cause speculation and uncertainty
  • Facilities issues and expected resolutions, including for power outages, shut-off water, HVAC problems, emergency repairs, parking lot maintenance, etc.
  • Conducting drills
  • Alerting for unplanned conference calls. Although AMG Alerts has its own integrated conferencing with alerting, many customers use their own – but they use the notification system to grab people in emergencies and direct them to the call
  • Substance-abuse testing. If the employee notification system can target specific individuals, it can be used to alert them (in multiple modes) as to the need to report
  • Reminders about important organizational events
  • Emergency guidance about handling unforeseen events, i.e. “Please to do not talk to the media”. “Report sightings to manager”, etc.
  • Dealing with local health issues. This is one we unfortunately may see with increasing frequency, and maintaining employees or groups of them from entering or leaving an area might be an essential activity

If you’ve been managing an organization for a while, you’ll see some familiar concepts above. And we will undoubtedly be adding to this list as we see equally compelling uses.

Text Alert System – Public vs. Private Systems

Posted by Dave Burr on March 29, 2014
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In some of our articles regarding employee notification systems and school notification systems, we mention the benefit of a “private” notification system without much clarification.

There are three basic categories of notification system:

Public: These are the government sponsored programs where federal, state, and sometimes local government works with telephone and wireless companies to provide types of warnings, such as Amber Alerts,  to devices. Normally the operating system allows opt-in or -out of these notifications.

Corporate-sponsored: Most people are familiar with, say, television stations scrolling school and sometimes company closures along the bottom of the screen. While to some degree there is “serving of the public interest”, these are basically marketing programs designed to enhance viewership. Similarly, many media outlets allow you to text a keyword to a short code to receive some sort of alert, often related to weather but other messages could be piggybacked along with those. The business concept behind those offerings is to build awareness of and loyalty to the provider of the messages, and sometimes to sell other goods and services.

Private: These are the mass notification systems that YOU control. Obviously they are essential because while a corporate-sponsored system might alert you to the fact that there is a snowstorm in the area, you need a private system to provide whatever details apply specifically to your organization.  And the fact is that the vast majority of notifications that are sent via a private system like AMG Alerts do not deal specifically with anything weather-related (at least in a macro sense) but instead issues that are unforeseen:  security issues, system failures, and other localized phenomena.

Certainly there is a place for all three layers because they serve different purposes.

 

Employee Notification Systems – In-Office Notification Considerations

Posted by Dave Burr on January 1, 2014
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We often see customers or potential customers concerned that they be able to ring every extension in the office in order to contact their employees about some critical issue. Some also believe that all extensions ring simultaneously, or nearly so. There are practical issues in play that should cause some to at least “de-emphasize” this approach to emergency communication.

First, most inter-office systems of any significant size actually do not have the bandwidth for every extension to be used at the same time. What happens then is that an automated IVR system encountering a busy or dead air or no answer may (or may not depending on the system) retry on a set interval, and in few cases would or should that interval be “immediate.” During this time, physical communication, or at the very least, behavior, on the part of in-office employees will take place that makes a callback at some later time, even if it is 5 minutes, moot.

For extensions in use, usually the message goes right to voicemail, and again, before the message is actually listened to by the employee, they already get the information from others.

Add to this the real potential that the office phone system would be the first thing to become completely inoperative in a power failure, and ultimately, the key to getting the word out within an office is actual word-of mouth spawned by a notification via wireless devices (whether it is Voice or Text).  Look at your own office – what percentage of employees being actually being told about something via an automated system would be required before action would occur?  10%? 20%? You almost certainly wouldn’t need much more than that.

Voice notification to landlines is most often used in cases where you don’t have the incredible communication leverage that an office situation provides, and is less likely to be bogged down or inoperable than would an office system in an emergency.  Many AMG Alerts customers like the option to call home landline phones depending on the situation, just to extend the possibility that the employee gets the information. Information is so easy to distribute among in-office employees, and the challenge most of our customers face is getting at people who are NOT sitting across the the room from them or in the next cubicle.

Employee Notification System Database Planning

Posted by Dave Burr on October 26, 2013
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In a past post we spoke about the value of simplicity in the data structure. Because we see our AMG Alerts customers over-complicating their databases all the time, and it’s been a while, I will touch on this again.

When an organization considers how to split up the population for selective notification (assuming that it’s even necessary), we see evidence the the first question they ask is “How can I split everyone into hierarchies and groups?” There is further evidence that that organizations look to their HRIS database and see how it may be broken out there. But the HRIS is used for a different purpose, so that shouldn’t determine the setup of the notification system.

And unfortunately we also see customers making it as complicated as our system will allow, without regard to whether such minute groupings would ever be used as part of a “response” to a situation.

In mass notification, the “old saying” (the quotes are there because actually we just made this up ourselves) is: “It’s almost always better to inform too many people than too few.” That means that if you break up your database into tiny slivers, your maintenance requirements can grow exponentially. Try not to create a system where just because Joe Tucker is now Salaried instead of Hourly, or he moved from second shift to first shift, he now is not going to get the message because his profile within the notification system hasn’t been updated. Most of the time you can cover subgroups with the message text. Consider blowing away the “shift” subgroup and just send to all Plant employees, “second shift is cancelled tonight.” And there are very few emergencies where you’d send a message to only the people that are Salaried.

Yes, of course there are some good reasons to break up the database. You might need to send sensitive information to the Executive Team that need not be shared with everyone. You might have a very large population and want to minimize messaging costs. Or maybe you send messages so often that you’d get push-back from the “unaffected” portion of the population.

Erring on the side of simplicity, however, is a good policy. Consider REALISTIC scenarios about how you might want to selectively send, and then set up the system that way. Of you start with complexity, the person launching the notification might start using that complexity and you’ll ultimately end up in the “notified ‘too few'” category. If you start with simplicity, you won’t have the “too few” issue problem. You can always break up your database further as you run into realistic scenarios where that is needed.

Employee Notification System – Information Gathering

Posted by Dave Burr on September 13, 2013
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One of the first considerations in the implementation of a mass notification system in a business setting is the population of the communications profiles for employees, particularly in situations where there is not much contact data available.

There are various ways of populating a system. One is to distribute a link, normally via e-mail in which the new system is introduced, and allow employees to sign up and express their preferences. The second, at least within AMG Alerts is to pre-load the system (via file upload) with some data, then use the AMG Alerts system to go out and solicit – via email – preference information, mobile phone numbers, and other relevant bits.

A third is to do it all internally, which works but of course always results in data that is high in “control” but usually lacking in comprehensiveness or accuracy.

The first two methods are the most popular, but in some applications, our potential customer will say “our people on the shop floor don’t have emails”. Notwithstanding that a more accurate statement would be “while we provide corporate email accounts to our office people, the shop personnel are not assigned emails and we don’t know their personal ones”, it is still a challenge to get them ramped up.

Here are some of the options for overcoming this:

  1. Manually distribute the signup URL to the shop people and let them do it that way. Of course, your participation rate could be a little less than perfect to start, but that will get fixed after the first “emergency” (Note that you can use an application like TinyURL to to make the shortest possible URL for the employees if they have to actually type it)
  2. Another cool way of providing the signup link is via a QR code printed in some prominent spot. But not everyone has a reader app on their phone. On the other hand, it is free and useful so it may be a good way of introducing employees to the concept because it has value in other communications
  3. Put the signup link somewhere within the company web site. People can navigate to it at their liesure, perhaps from home
  4. Designate desk or kiosk with the signup for AMG Alerts up and ready to go and allow a few days for employees to spend a minute putting in their profiles
  5. Have front-line managers or HR gather email addresses for each employee, and then that could be part of an initial upload. Then our system can be used to go out and ask for the rest of the information in the profile
  6. A slight variation of the above is to get ALL the information, mimicking on some paper form the information on the AMG Alerts signup, and then pur that in manually or via an upload

The key, unless the system is being maintained completely internally, is to get email addresses for each employee because system maintenance then becomes so much easier using the tools on our site. Just like refrigerators, opinions, and phones, everyone in this day and age has at least one. It isn’t always effortless to get it but the rewards are well worth it!

Employee Notification System – Eyes on the Database!

Posted by Dave Burr on May 4, 2013
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Some of our customers have the goal of automating every process that can possibly be automated. Some of it is based on the good old-fashioned love of technology, and much of it is based on the assumption (often wrong) that automating every task reduces overall costs. With AMG Alerts, we can support a variety of automation. But we don’t always embrace the view that automation is always better.

And of course we always embrace the idea that employees should be able to at least have the opportunity to update their data directly on our system.

Instead of going into the myriad examples of how automation can INCREASE overall cost when you look at the big picture, let’s look at one fundamental thing in the case of notification systems: the ability to use your mass notification system to communicate.

Wholesale replacements of the database, when automated, are extremely dangerous and may leave you looking at a blank contact database an a very inopportune time. Even the safer method, incremental updates, can leave you with missing information at the wrong time.

We encourage our customers, even if they use an automated process to generate the data, to log in and run the updates on our interface so they can take a glance at the results of their changes. Which is worse: 1) Only updating the database once every two weeks (because of the perceived “cost” of logging in more frequently), or 2) trying to issue an emergency notification and noticing that there is missing data and having to deal with that, when you possibly don’t even have access to a critical system to fix the problem?

In the case of #1, worst case, a couple of people might not get the message because their data didn’t get changed. But that ALWAYS happens and has nothing to do with the mass notification system itself. (we have dealt with this in another blog article, and will write more). So ultimately, which would you rather have?