It’s common for managers to begin their employee alert system deployment with a search for text alert systems. After all, it is the most popular mode, That’s how most of our customers find us. However, text alone will not cover every person not every scenario. First, not everyone has access to SMS. Given that, you need to have your bases covered with other modes. There are accessibility issues that may be better covered with Voice of Email.
Also, consider our article “Spamming via SMS“. Yes, this is a real thing! You may have a legitimate issue that needs to be highlighted that is not quite important enough to bother 250 people who might be on vacation, in heavy traffic, or at the dinner table. This is where email is important. When we point that out, we often hear that “we already have that for the office, and most of the people out in the shop don’t have email addresses” Well of course they do, and they need to be collected as part of system deployment. Not only that, a good percentage of AMG Alerts customers use our system occasionally to broadcast information about outages of their email systems, so collection of everyone’s personal email address is always beneficial, as a good system can toggle back and forth between business and personal email.
Therefore, an adequate system should include comprehensive email, text, and voice. We add web to that, because there are instances where an employee may feel he/she should have received a message and has not, and thus becomes anxious. His they are able to check for messages on demand, that problem is averted.
We always suggest that ALL modes need to be carefully considered at the outset. Nobody wants to have to “start over” in their deployment of an employee alert system.