Internal communication in large enterprise organizations is a challenge. Those challenges are amplified in outages and other critical situations.
In outages and other critical situations, tens of thousands of staff might start looking for answers at the same time. This can overload IT teams with a deluge of support tickets that can’t be responded to.
Incident response and disaster recovery protocols kick in as work begins to understand the issue, deal with the problem, and/or restore services. Those protocols can be highly efficient and effective, but employees at their computers in the office, on their laptops at home, or on their phones in the field remain in the dark.
Critical Messaging Scenarios
It’s not just about employees being left in the dark, as the challenges are exacerbated if the outage or other critical situation demands communication beyond information about what has happened and when systems will be restored.
What if payroll processing is impacted by the outage, so the payment of salaries will be delayed?
What if there is a real-time cyberattack that requires staff to take immediate and specific protective actions?
What if a critical situation increases the physical safety risks of employees that must be mitigated with updated instructions or advice?
Getting Control
In situations like the examples highlighted above, effective communication is part of getting control. But how can you effectively communicate in outages and other critical situations?
Emails and Microsoft Teams might be down. Even if they are not, emails can get lost in the noise of a typical employee’s email inbox.
Chat platforms can be siloed, so they have gaps in their reach. And they might be down too.
Communication solutions like status update pages can be largely unread.
SMS and pager solutions, meanwhile, can be effective for communicating with small incident response teams, but lack the detail required for messaging a diverse group of employees at scale.
Compliance is another factor to consider. Best practice is to keep audit trails of communications in outage and other critical situations. Many of the potential communication solutions lack full audit trail capabilities.
A desktop notification system is the solution as it will give you control over messaging in outages and other critical situations. A desktop notification system will also increase your control over the situation itself.
Desktop Notification Systems
Desktop notification systems cut through the noise of emails and messaging platforms to deliver critical communications to employees directly to their devices. They can also function when regular communication tools go down, such as emails or Teams.
They are also flexible and enable feature-rich messaging at scale in situations where effective communication is critical.
Essential Functionality of Desktop Notification Systems
There are a number of key features you should look for when considering desktop notification systems. Those features include:
- The ability to operate when primary communication channels go down. Teams messages are an effective means of communication in many organizations, but what happens if Teams is down? You need an alternative.
- Detailed analytics capabilities so you can see who has read the message and taken the required action.
- Two-way communication capabilities are required as there are many critical situations where a response or information is required to help resolve the issue.
- The ability to message target groups of employees or send company-wide communications. The ability to tailor critical messages for specific target groups is also beneficial.
- The ability to integrate with other systems, such as ServiceNow. Integration can extend the functionality and capabilities of the desktop notification system.
- Audit and compliance capabilities, including the creation of logs, so there is a record of who sent what and when, as well as a record of who received the communication and what they did with it.
Access Signal: Best in Class Desktop Notification System
At Access Capture, our Symphony product includes the Signal desktop notification messaging system. It has all the essential functionality outlined above, so it will help you get control of outages and other critical situations.
There are also extensive use applications for Access Signal in business-as-usual situations. To learn more and get a demo, please get in touch.
