Sending a notification is extremely important, but getting a response back from the recipient can be just as vital. When a crisis occurs, you often need more than just confirmation that the alert was delivered. You need information. Two-way communication transforms your notification service into a crisis management tool. By using a notification service’s two-way feature, like Send Word Now’s Get Word Back, message recipients can easily acknowledge receipt of an alert, confirm their ability to respond to a particular situation, and if necessary, account for their personal well-being.
What use cases support two-way messaging? The following scenarios illustrate some of the ways in which emergency notification service users implement this feature.
- A fire breaks out in a warehouse on an industrial campus. The fire alarms automatically trigger an alert to all employees telling them to evacuate using the established safety plan. Now, you need an easy way to account for your employees’ safety. As part of the alert, you can ask “Are you ok?” The notification service will collect responses and report the results, so you will know who responded with “Yes” or with “No” as well as who didn’t respond at all.
- An IT outage occurs after hours and you need to gather a response team to deal with the crisis. Sending a notification is great, but how do know who will receive the message and get out of bed and in to the office? Using a feature like Get Word Back, you can ask “Can you report to the office?” Again, recipients can respond. In coordination with an escalation feature (another Most Wanted), you can efficiently establish a response team without phone trees or spending valuable time tracking down employees.
Sometimes you may need more than a polling question to get the information you need. A good two-way communication feature will allow for free-form responses when using email notifications. Free-form responses help establish response plans or gather details on a critical event when you aren’t the one on the ground.
The advantages of powerful two-way communication amplify the already solid benefits of an emergency notification service. The added security and knowledge provided by two-way communication make it a most-wanted feature.
