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?