Employee Notification

We are often asked the question by our AMG Alerts customers and prospects “How quickly will all of our people receive the message once we launch it?”

Some companies answer this question by giving statistics about the throughput of their system, whether it’s text, email, voice, etc.  Such a reply is misleading. The correct answer to that question is “whenever the message becomes available to the recipient”

Yes, front-end system performance is important, but it really isn’t the determining factor in recipients’ getting the message. In the case of text messaging, carrier networks have to get the messages to devices. The device needs to be available to the network, the network can’t be overloaded with data, and the device must be in the possession of the recipient. So, applying common sense, “all” recipients might not get the message for minutes, hours, or days.

Voice messaging has variables too. A power outage may render landline phones useless, to a significant degree. And if you are sending to a wireless device, you have the same issues as mentioned above.

If you are ringing landline phones in an office environment, normally there isn’t enough bandwidth available to the local equipment to actually ring every extension at the same time. In many cases, less than half of the extensions can be in use at any given time, so an automated system receives busy signals and has to keep trying at various intervals.

In any case, about half of voice calls result in a voicemail being left, so of course the recipient must first discover and listen to the voicemail.

In the case of email, it has to have not gone to spam, the email has to be checked, and the message must be noticed and read.

Common sense? For the most part, yes. What it means is that if people need to be informed of something quickly, it usually means that you need to use as many modes as possible, and a lot needs to go right. Fortunately, most messages sent do not need to be received in seconds, and notification systems largely fulfill their promise, as a whole. But remember that it is what happens downstream that counts.

Several mass notifications systems, such as AMG Alerts, have tools to allow recipients to add or at least manage their own profiles in order that the system is independent from other systems within the customer’s organization. The primary reason for this, surprising to many, is not technical but instead, the benefit of short implementation time. Many trying to implement an employee notification system or a school alert system want the solution NOW.

Often, as time goes by, people as us to do integration with their current system. While we do not want this to become a technical article any more than it is (or will be) , we generally recommend “batch” updates for the sake of practicality.  And with the added reason of security, neither our customers nor us seriously consider any type of real-time interactions between our two information databases. The batch concept works.

And since we are automating here and have, usually, no human babysitter, we also recommend to our customers incremental updates. This means that we get the ADDs and deal with those and we get the DELETES and deal with those.  Such a process is far less dangerous because the unchanged records, which represent 95+% of the database, can sit there safely without being subject to being wiped out when, say, whole data sets are replaced but the source that our customer provides contains no records due to an automation hiccup.

There are other good reasons for this design and we always work closely with our customers to design an efficient overall process and then work automation based on that.

Companies are increasingly interested in employee notification systems such as AMG Alerts to deal with unforeseen issues on a timely basis. Sometimes it is as simple as letting employees and partners know that a necessary computer system is down. Other times it may be genuine emergencies that require quick action.

And as we normally suggest, our customers in most cases do not dilute the value of an AMG Alerts notification by mixing the mundane with the vastly important. They use their more traditional communications channels for the former, even if they are slightly less effective at reaching people.

Often, when a company gets started with AMG Alerts, they give careful thought to the setup, sometimes putting in place a system that allows extreme granularity among the Subscriber (our word for potential recipient) population. This allows them to target groups with pinpoint precision. While this seems like it would be a great idea, it has its downsides, which can be significant:

1) Maintenance:  Too much granularity – excessive “categorization” among the Subscriber base – creates an additional maintenance burden. It means that there is more likely that a person will move from one group to another and not be covered by laser-focused messaging until there is an update.

2) Confusion at Alert Launch: During the setup process, it’s clear what the categorization nomenclature means because it’s fresh in everyone’s mind. But then the system may go six months or more before an Admin needs to launch an urgent message. Confusion at that point causes delays or incorrect distribution.

You can set up AMG Alerts to send to Peoria location, Second Shift, Maintenance Department, Group A employees, and target only that group. But you could also send to all Peoria employees and specify who is affected within the message itself (!)

Do what’s right for you, but our motto regarding important messaging is  “Its almost always better to communicate to too many people, than too few.”  Keeping the system simple will almost certainly yield rewards.