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January 12, 2022 Posted by Pocketstop in Business Continuity, Crisis Communications Social Share
As more people have worked remotely since 2020, our behaviors are increasingly digital and even distracted. While this can cause a host of issues, one of the most paramount is reaching employees in a critical situation.
Crisis messages need to be received and read immediately. In order to accomplish this, one must take into account recipients preferred and quickest modes of communication. These vary by people’s habits, workstyles, and connectivity/availability.
Only using one channel, such as email, is unreliable and unlikely to reach a large portion of the audience. Average email read rates are 18% in 2021, and even of those that read the messages it may not be immediately. In addition, internal systems can go down or networks can be jammed or overloaded in a location-based crisis, making this one channel unreliable for urgent communications.
Depending on an employee’s role or personal workstyle preferences, they may be using a mobile phone primarily, which makes SMS messages another option. Many organizations have a company app with push notifications to reach people, but research shows that just 12% of consumers prefer a company’s mobile app for receiving communications, and those notifications require the user to allow, as well as strong internet access or cellular connectivity.
The best strategy for communicating urgent information is using a multi-channel approach. This ensures notifications actually reach the right people immediately, regardless of location, bandwidth/network issues, allowed push notifications, internet access, or preference. To implement multi-channel notifications, you need a central system for one-click, multi-channel communication, and a way to get responses or feedback to analyze.
With the newly varied workforce, virtual platforms and business communication tools have become necessary and commonplace. Microsoft Teams usage has exploded in the past year, and is forecasted to continue growing at an incredible pace.
Teams has the presence to be a critical channel for many organizations. The sheer number of users means the ability to interrupt recipients for immediate awareness.
Specifically, the use of Teams integrated within a mass notification tool like RedFlag has many advantages:
Effective, disruptive notifications
Full messaging functionality
The likelihood of needing to send emergency communications is only increasing; COVID-19 announcements and alerts, weather and outage advisories, cyber attack updates, active threats, and others. The real question is, will the communications be seen? Microsoft Teams is a powerful additional channel to help when time matters, and RedFlag is the only system to send mass notifications via Teams.
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With the RedFlag + Microsoft Teams integration, organizations now have a new option to reach employees, vendors, and stakeholders in the event of an emergency or crisis situation. When time is of the essence during an emergency, the more communication channels available, the quicker a message can be acted upon. And the Teams integration within RedFlag is easy to setup – just a few clicks, and users are able to use recipient data to easily create custom segmented groups.
As a Microsoft Silver Partner, the Teams integration is only one part of how RedFlag integrates with Microsoft products. As the only mass notification platform with this relationship, users can rely on top tier security, as well as seamless setup and ongoing smooth maintenance, resulting in less time managing systems and more time on what counts.
Current Microsoft and RedFlag users enjoy:
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