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.