text alert system

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Employee Alert System Uses

Posted by Dave Burr on September 23, 2020
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Most of our would-be AMG Alerts customers come to us with a specific purpose in mind, often spurred on by a recent event. But when you consider the myriad uses for an employee notification system, it’s a wonder that any organization has survived without one — at least without a steady level of pain over a period of years.

Here are a few examples that are real-life. We see them every day:

  • Weather-related messaging. Okay, this is the granddaddy of them all but we have seen systems underutilized here
  • IT systems-related issues. This is the second most popular use. Employees are informed of email/phone/special information application outages and their resolutions
  • Calling in personnel to handle a shortfall
  • Calling off personnel – i.e. cancelling a shift
  • Road closings and other local events that might impede travel to (or away from) the facility
  • Security situations, not only the unlikely “active shooter” scenario, but more likely issues such as suspicious persons or police activity
  • Informing about what is NOT an emergency – i.e. explaining smoke, suspicious odors, emergency vehicles in proximity, loud noises in the area, etc. that have no impact on safety or security but cause speculation and uncertainty
  • Facilities issues and expected resolutions, including for power outages, shut-off water, HVAC problems, emergency repairs, parking lot maintenance, etc.
  • Conducting drills
  • Alerting for unplanned conference calls. Although AMG Alerts has its own integrated conferencing with alerting, many customers use their own – but they use the notification system to grab people in emergencies and direct them to the call
  • Substance-abuse testing. If the employee notification system can target specific individuals, it can be used to alert them (in multiple modes) as to the need to report
  • Reminders about important organizational events
  • Emergency guidance about handling unforeseen events, i.e. “Please to do not talk to the media”. “Report sightings to manager”, etc.
  • Dealing with local health issues. This is one we unfortunately may see with increasing frequency, and maintaining employees or groups of them from entering or leaving an area might be an essential activity

If you’ve been managing an organization for a while, you’ll see some familiar concepts above. And we will undoubtedly be adding to this list as we see equally compelling uses.

Shop Floor Employees – Don’t Leave Them Out!

Posted by Dave Burr on October 29, 2018
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One challenge that many of our AMG Alerts customers face is the spotty availability of some of the more valuable contact information for non-office employees, usually defined as those who don’t have company-provided emails. With email, the rollout of an employee alert system is truly a piece of cake because you can include signup links. Even if an administrator wants to use another method to populate the alert system database, their HRIS data often contains more contact information (i.e. mobile versus home landlines, personal emails) for office employees than those on the plant floor.

We do see companies give up on the idea of 100% inclusion. They use the alert system to get to a certain level and then rely on front-line management for “last mile” communication. Obviously this compromises effectiveness.

Statistics show that the vast majority of employees, at any level, do have access to email. Granted, in some cases, use may be spotty, but if they are aware of the purpose of the data collection campaign, they will provide it make a special effort to monitor it during the system rollout. Of course while the are providing that, they can provide the other data for use in the alert system, assuming the administrator plans centralized entry of all the data.

One creative thing that some customers have done is provide centralized “kiosks” so that employees can access our portal(s) to enter their information. These are simply web-enabled desktops located in strategic places such as lunchrooms and other common areas. Employees can, over the course of several days, enter in all the necessary data including their preferences.  A “campaign” such as this also highlights the importance of the system, which is another major benefit.

If You See Something, Say Something

Posted by Dave Burr on February 3, 2018
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The missile alert mishap in Hawaii which occurred in January 2018 taught many lessons. We will touch on a few of them in future articles. We hope that one takeaway is the need for training on the part of people with the capacity to cause mass panic. Sounds pretty obvious, right? Not to everyone. We have been pushing back against the notion, fostered in a few small circles, that each individual employee or participant in an organization have the ability to launch mass alerts.

This really happened: A potential customer, supposedly armed with “consultants” on the conference call, stated, “if an employee sees what he thinks is the barrel of a rifle, he should be able to send that information immediately to all employees.” I suggested that such information should be vetted in order to:

  1. determine what is actually happening
  2. determine what to communicate and to whom in order to get the most positive outcome. Yelling at the top of your lungs isn’t very constructive. It wasn’t in Hawaii

We will be writing more about “active shooter” situations and protocols, which account for a negligible percentage of mass alert applications (and frankly shouldn’t rely so much on various outside networks provided by wireless carriers.)

It’s clear that many people believe that speed is the most important element in employee notification. However, getting proper information to the proper people is what’s important. That responsibility should be given to the few who are trained to do it. The “if you see something” campaign does not suggest at all that each individual should be provided with an air raid siren.

That said, each person SHOULD have the ability to initiate a mass notification. And that starts with each person knowing who to contact and how, with minimal delays. There aren’t that many situations where an employee notification system is used where minutes count. But let’s imagine that they do. Do your employees know to whom to “say something” if they have a concern? Who are the proper point people? Organizations almost always fall down on that basic element. Let’s start there. Once that is done, everything starts falling into place because you can get from information source to properly generated mass alert very quickly.

Text Alert System – Public vs. Private Systems

Posted by Dave Burr on March 29, 2017
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In some of our articles regarding employee notification systems and school notification systems, we mention the benefit of a “private” notification system without much clarification.

There are three basic categories of notification system:

Public: These are the government sponsored programs where federal, state, and sometimes local government works with telephone and wireless companies to provide types of warnings, such as Amber Alerts,  to devices. Normally the operating system allows opt-in or -out of these notifications.

Corporate-sponsored: Most people are familiar with, say, television stations scrolling school and sometimes company closures along the bottom of the screen. While to some degree there is “serving of the public interest”, these are basically marketing programs designed to enhance viewership. Similarly, many media outlets allow you to text a keyword to a short code to receive some sort of alert, often related to weather but other messages could be piggybacked along with those. The business concept behind those offerings is to build awareness of and loyalty to the provider of the messages, and sometimes to sell other goods and services.

Private: These are the mass notification systems that YOU control. Obviously they are essential because while a corporate-sponsored system might alert you to the fact that there is a snowstorm in the area, you need a private system to provide whatever details apply specifically to your organization.  And the fact is that the vast majority of notifications that are sent via a private system like AMG Alerts do not deal specifically with anything weather-related (at least in a macro sense) but instead issues that are unforeseen:  security issues, system failures, and other localized phenomena.

Certainly there is a place for all three layers because they serve different purposes.

 

Employee Notification Systems and “Supplier Anonymity”

Posted by Dave Burr on March 10, 2016
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Every one in a while we are asked “does the employee have to know that it is AMG Alerts behind the messaging system, or can we make it appear that it is all our company?”

Transparency is fairly difficult in situations where you are offering portals or various access to the application by employees themselves. But even for companies (our customers) that do not offer any access to profiles, there are still a few issues.

  • Email is more likely to be treated as Spam by various anti-spam programs if the actual Sender is not clear. And in any case, we can’t hide it simply by doing an “on behalf of”, so why even take the risk when the idea is to get the message to the recipient? Proper identification of the Sender is also important so that employees can whitelist right right address(es).
  • On a regular basis, we get contacted by our customers’ employees telling us that they are in the wrong group or wrong company or that their contact information needs to be updated. We are really the only ones visible in some setups. Mass notification system suppliers such as AMG Alerts are ultimately partners in the process, or should be. By the way, the situation where an employee comes to the supplier is one of the many downsides of complete internal management of the database, and this will be covered in a future blog article.
  • Third is the business consideration. Customers actually present considerable risk to mass notification companies because in almost every case, the company do not monitor message content or recipient data – at least in real time. This means that their various supplier and carriers can shut them down, or they may have legal exposure, because of a single rogue customer. Having just enough visibility to give a recipient a place to complain protects the business, which of course protects ALL of the customers.

 

 

Mass Notification System Opt-In/Out for SMS

Posted by Dave Burr on October 16, 2015
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While it may seem straightforward, the issue of opt-in and opt-out in Employee Notification System or Mass Notification System applications can be a tricky one.

First, there is the basic issue of including opt-out information on every outbound text, as good practice usually dictates. In the real world, the recipient should have already received opt-out instructions and sometimes that precious character space in the limited SMS world could be used for the urgent message.

This begs a solution that should include an opt-in or some other on-boarding process for employees, students, residents, or other group that includes clear communications about what types of message they will receive and how to opt out. With our broad base of AMG Alerts customers, we have seen many instances where this might not be happening. Rather than using the external portals that we provide, which provide these instructions (as well as, obviously, the “opt-in”), our customer is uploading data that may not be current, and worse, the use of the system my be different than what might have been specifically “contracted for” by the recipient, as ownership of the alerts program has changed.

We counter this by being up front with our identity on all messages, regardless of mode, as the mass notification system provider and we make sure our customers do the same in terms of their identities. This way, a recipient always has somewhere to go even if they do not follow one of the opt-out processes that we provide.

In fact, our system is “email-based” to a large degree, meaning that we get emails for most people regardless of the mode used for alerts. This is so that our system can be used, by our customer, outside the normal process to directly ASK recipients if they still want to be included in the program and provide an opt-out link. This functionality is handy when the database has been allowed to get “stale” and/or the purpose of the system has changed.

At the end of the day, we have to be ultra-sensitive to SMS “spam” concerns because as bad as e-mail is, at least we have tools to fight it. People see unwanted SMS messages as a real violation, so we always encourage our customers to only upload and use SMS information if they have recent permission for it to be used with their purpose in mind and communicate that it’s coming. Otherwise, use the opt-in/modification portals so that the recipient has control initially and on an ongoing basis.

Employee Notification System – “Cascading” vs. “Blast” Systems

Posted by Dave Burr on September 23, 2015
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While it is generally the most cost efficient to send one notification to the recipient in the manner in which he or she has indicated would be most effective, some situations might call for a more aggressive approach in which several modes are used. There are a couple of ways to do this:

  1. via “Cascading” attempts, wherein an SMS is sent, for example, and then after some designated period of time if there is no reply, a voice to a land line might be attempted. Then after some period of time (delay), another mode might be attempted if there is no reply
  2. via “Blast”, wherein all the modes are attempted immediately

With AMG Alerts, we take the Blast approach because we consider it superior for several reasons:

  • A Cascading model has delays built into the process, presumably so that no more modes will be used than necessary. This COULD have capacity benefits for the mass notification supplier (or could cost them in capacity if they don’t make the “delay” long enough. )It could have cost benefits for the end users. depending on the pricing model. But if a message is important enough to be launched multi-mode, why introduce these delays just to save a few dollars? Just send it out all at once.
  • In 99% of the situations that we see, notification messages don’t require a response, and without that, a cascading system can’t work! You couldn’t just use the simple fact that a voicemail was left or an SMS  message was delivered as confirmation that you don’t need to move to the next mode

Emergency Notification System Event Management

Posted by Dave Burr on May 25, 2012
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Our prospective customers planning to implement AMG Alerts as a tool to handle unforeseen situations at events often state “I am not sure how effective this will be if most people don’t sign up.”

Our viewpoint is the following:

  • In almost every case, most people will NOT sign up, so plan on that
  • In almost every case, the system will be effective anyway

It’s unreasonable to think that in an event where there might be 5,000, 10,000, or 50,000 people attending that most people attendees sign up for emergency alerts of some kind. Many won’t know about the availability of alerts, many won’t care, and many will figure that the odds of needing it are too slim to bother with it. You could easily end up with 5% participation, at best. And that’s okay.

In this vein, here are a couple of anecdotes that come to mind:

1)      In the fall of 2010, Purdue basketball forward Robbie Hummel tore his ACL on the first day of basketball practice. This happened mid-morning on a football Saturday at Purdue. Within an hour, 30,000 tailgaters in their various designated areas, spread over 2,500 acres of campus, knew about this. I’m sure it spread even more quickly among the student population on campus. And at game time, all 60,000 people in the stadium knew about it. I witnessed the phenomenon from a tailgater’s perspective and wondered what tiny percentage of the 30,000 people INITIALLY heard the news and how it could have spread like wildfire. At the end of the day, all it takes a lot of people who are interested in the issue and a few people to ignite the fire within various densely-packed pockets.

 2)      In the spring of 2011, I was at the second-largest aviation event in the U.S., the annual Sun ‘n’ Fun Fly-In in Lakeland, FL. A violent storm with embedded tornadoes swept across the event, damaging or destroying dozens of aircraft, flooding the area, knocking out power, and basically making a mess of the event. Nobody is knocking the lack of preparation on the part of the organizers, especially because they learned from that event, but it resulted in hours of chaos. None of the attendees, spread over an area about 10% of that in the Purdue example above, knew that they were trying to shut down the event and in fact clear everyone out to begin a massive cleanup operation of spilled porta-potties and aviation fuel, wrecked airplanes, and the like. I was there for that too and as people crammed into one of the many pole buildings trying to hear a guy on a megaphone standing on an emergency vehicle, I thought of how quickly word would spread if just 50 or 100 people out of 10,000 had known what the organizers had been trying to do.

So besides the obvious PR aspects of providing emergency notification, be aware that it only takes a small spark to start wildfire, and it might not matter much how big the spark is compared to the size of the field.

Text Notification System – Sign Up Via Short Code?

Posted by Dave Burr on May 7, 2012
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Text Notification System – Signing Up Via Text

We do get the question occasionally; “can our employees just text ‘Acme Widget Company’ to your short code and sign up for our system?” While we can do that with AMG Alerts, it has a few downsides – most of which are significant:

1)      Text notification is indeed very fast and convenient, but if I am allowed to back out of the premise completely for a second – not everyone has that capability for various reasons and there needs to be a way to accommodate other methods. (maybe this should be a footnote as opposed to a list item!)

2)      If someone just sends SMS to a short code, all you’ll know about them is their phone number. That isn’t a very good way of establishing a comprehensive communications system. Of course you could then get the rest of the information through a serious of SMS exchanges, but that would be cumbersome to the point of being silly.

3)   In normal applications of texting in an employee messaging scenario, phone interaction instructions take up valuable character real estate. Remember, the length of SMS messages is limited.

The bottom line is that texting keywords to short code for system signup, while often appropriate, especially in marketing or short-term campaigns, wouldn’t generally be part of a critical notification system solution.