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.

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.

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!

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.