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If your crisis response team needs to be scaled up, you’ll want to be able to quickly mobilize the right people. Alerting software allows you to reach a large number of people in a short amount of time and let them know what is expected of them. Below, I’ve listed 10 key factors to consider when choosing alerting software that suits your organization.
Let me start with the obvious: it’s crucial that the software is reliable. And the system must be able to send a large number of messages in a short amount of time. This is particularly important when you need to contact or inform a large number of employees.
Alarm software must be user-friendly. It should have a clear interface that makes it easy to set up, manage, and send alerts.
Of course, you need to be able to configure your crisis management team’s alert procedures within the software. This requires software that offers sufficient configuration options. Consider, for example, the alert message, the recipient groups, the required number of people, and the order in which people should be alerted.
When you need to send out an alert, you want to be able to reach the right people immediately. That’s why it’s important for your alerting tool to offer multiple communication channels, so you can reach people via text message, phone call, app notification, or email, for example. Or, of course, via multiple channels at the same time, so the alert is impossible to miss.
If your organization has on-call shifts for specific crisis roles, it’s a good idea to have scheduling functionality in your alerting software. This allows you to schedule on-call shifts and ensure that the on-duty staff are notified.
You may want to alert multiple groups at once. Consider, for example, multiple crisis teams, specialists, and team leaders from different departments. These types of alerts, which consist of several sub-alerts, are also known as alert scenarios. The scenario must then be able to be activated with a simple action. For example, with the push of a button (physical or in the software) or with a trigger from, for example, other software or equipment, such as a fire alarm system.
If you need a specific number of people with a certain role, it is often not advisable to alert everyone with that role at once. In such cases, it’s helpful to first alert a limited group, with additional people within that group being automatically alerted if the initial recipients decline the alert or don’t respond. This automatic escalation can continue until the desired target number is reached.
Once you’ve sent one or more alerts, you’ll want to be able to track their progress. A status overview should show you who has been alerted and which individuals have accepted, declined, or not yet responded to the alert.
To ensure alerts are sent correctly, employees’ contact information—such as phone numbers—must, of course, always be up to date. Managing this manually is tedious and prone to errors. And if your organization has a large number of employees, this is a time-consuming task. But there is a solution. By linking the alerting software to your organization’s HRM software, employee information and contact details can be automatically synchronized on a regular basis. Contact details then only need to be maintained in one place and are always available and up-to-date in the alerting software. Furthermore, such a link ensures that employees who are no longer employed are automatically marked as inactive, preventing them from being accidentally alerted.
If you want to be sure something will work, you’ll need to test it. The same goes for alarm software. So make sure the alarm software includes testing features, so you can verify that the alarms you’ve set up can be triggered without any issues.
