Make Sure You’re Prepared for Anticipated and Unanticipated Events
The recent East Coast crises of the Virginia earthquake and Hurricane Irene demonstrate the real need for automated communications solutions that enable businesses to communicate vital information to customers and employees during any kind of business disruption. However, these solutions have to work when business continuity professionals need them to, no matter what. Providers in this space face a definitive test on whether they can perform at mass scale, in burst mode, and for long durations of time during a crisis. Disasters that span significant regions put notification solutions to the ultimate test in that all customers in the region are executing the system at the same time.
While the Virginia Earthquake and Hurricane Irene share many characteristics of regional crisis management, they differ significantly when it comes to the dynamics of automated communications.
Hurricane Irene came with advanced notice in the form of long range weather forecasts, which allowed business continuity personnel to solidify their continuity and communication strategy days in advance. In fact, the precision of the predicted hurricane trajectory led to a more precise communication strategy—giving crisis managers a window of opportunity to leverage advanced notification techniques to their employees, customers, students, residence and constituents. Disasters such as Hurricane Irene typically result in lower messaging volumes since the communication strategies are protracted and targeted using GIS technology or specific regional call lists. In addition, in these scenarios, recipients are ready for the messaging and expect the flurry of communications and can respond appropriately. This leads to streamlined communication efforts, ultimately allowing for more precise and accurate responses.
Contrast that to the Virginia earthquake, which struck with no notice. Message volumes were widespread, non-targeted, came in burst fashion, and resulted in much higher volumes. The messaging volume was 100 percent crisis-based vs. preparation-based.
Modern notification systems allow crisis managers to focus more on the crisis at hand and rely heavily on advanced automated techniques to manage the communication piece of the incident. The ability to automate helps not just with an initial widespread communication to a targeted set of recipients, but allows companies to build and automate all successive follow-up notifications. By having a notification system holistically and automatically carry out business and notification rules based on recipient responses, a crisis manager can channel more of their attention to the crisis.
For example, successful crisis teams can automatically re-communicate with recipients who are unresponsive, or who have answered “Yes” to needing assistance, or who have responded positively that they arrived at the alternate crisis facility. All of these communications can be scripted, tested, drilled and automated during a crisis leading to the highest potential of recipient accountability.
The recent events of Hurricane Irene and the Virginia earthquake demonstrates not only the need of a comprehensive advanced notification system, but one that has the maturity that lets administrators pre-define and automate follow-up communications to re-contact recipients without manual intervention during an unplanned event.
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