Tuesday, 13 November 2012

How do you get yours?

It’s 17:10 on a Monday evening and you are just about to leave the office. Most of your colleagues have already left and as you check your inbox one last time you notice an email from your manager advising, “The office will be closed to all staff tomorrow morning due to emergency building repairs. Please communicate this to all staff immediately.”  You instantly reach for the telephone but then realise most staff left at 17:00 and that there are hundreds of them to contact. You first panic, then after taking a minute to let your blood pressure normalise, consider sending out an email to all staff; it’s quick and easy to do but not even half of your staff have access to work emails from home and the half of those that do, probably won't. In fact, according to Phonedog, "email sit unread for an average of 48 hours before being read while SMS messages are usually opened only four minutes after being sent".

It’s at that moment when you remember a text alerting service which the comms or marketing or some other department recently adopted for sending out customer service updates. "The proportion of adults who personally own/use a mobile phone in the UK is 92%," according to Ofcom and as all members of staff have already given their contact mobile number, you realise that this would be the ideal communication tool to use. You quickly scroll through your emails and call through to the marketing department who confirm that the service is active and that you can use it. They make a small change to the set up to allow you access and a few minutes later you have sent out a text to all members of staff advising of the office closure, what to do instead and also asking staff to acknowledge receipt of the message by replying with their name.

You then leave the office, safe in the knowledge that your colleagues will receive the notification and that you will be able to easily check the replies against the list of staff the message was sent to.

This is just one example of how using texting (SMS) alerts for emergency communications can work and can be quicker and slicker than other forms of communication. Texting can actually be applied in a host of situations and by all company departments whether that be updating field staff, sending out IT alerts or notifying customers that their product is available or tracking where the delivery is.

HSL have an excellent text alert solution for time sensitive communications which is known as AlertBroadcast. Put simply, the solution will enable you to text a number of contacts quickly, reliably and also offers the ability for contacts to reply back to the message sender thus confirming receipt and correct comprehension of the message. Alertbroadcast is therefore cost-effective, fast and quite simply works. In fact, a number of HSL clients have been benefiting from the solution for years. For example, Dartmoor Search and Rescue have used the solution for over 5 years and have found it to be “extremely reliable”. Likewise Newmont Mining Corporation have commented that “the technology helps the warnings to be more immediate and effective in alerting our communities and staff in case of an emergency".

To find out more about how AlertBroadcast works and how it could improve your company communications view our AlertBroadcast page. If you’d like to test the solution for yourself, contact us and we’ll set you up with a free test account so that you can see the benefits in action for yourself.


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