In a society where people are increasingly working more flexibly and remotely, keeping in contact is more important than ever. But how do you communicate with all those people at the same time?
When an organisation has a mix of employees based in the office and some working from home either permanently or part of the week, the reliance upon email, landlines and mobile phones is of particular importance in being able to keep those remote employees informed of company news and everyday news from managers or team members.
In an emergency situation such as a real or even suspected terrorist threat in the area where an office building is located, senior management would want to be sure that their employees were fully aware of how they were managing the situation and that they had their employees’ welfare at heart. The natural communication methods of choice would be to send a message via email, SMS, and perhaps post updates on an intranet site in larger organisations.
But bear in mind that during the July 7th bombings the mobile network was so overloaded that many people could not get their messages through. Smart organisations will be looking for a multi-channel solution which can intelligently send messages on a priority basis, firstly trying SMS and then, if no response is made, trying email, voice recording on a landline or web status page. In today’s social media society publishing messages via Twitter and Facebook is also a perfectly legitimate way of reaching people.
In non-emergency situations the same tool coud be used to target customers with tailored information that would be of value to them, for example if a person signed up to a cinema’s mailing list they could receive timely SMS texts relating to film offers. Businesses could also send out promotions to their dealers, resellers or suppliers simultaneously.
The applications of a rapid notification solution are only limited by a person’s imagination, and in our ‘networking’ society it is more important than ever that the right information gets to the right people at the right time.
