Emergency Communication Top Features – Two-Way Communication

Today most alert solutions are uni-directional. They do not take in consideration valuable information, that participants might give.

The philosophy of a unified alert management solution, like for instance AlarmTILT (www.alarmtilt.com) is to reach key people in the shortest time possible by any means available, but also to permit action taking according to the replies given by the actors on the field. A reply to an email, a reply to an SMS, a reply to a voice alert, a reply to an instant message, these are key functionalities. They are the base to many other alert functionalities, such as:

- Escalation procedures
notify single destinations or groups by email, SMS and voice alert in predefined steps according to organisation rules. Alert will escalate to following step in case of no reply, until first participant acknowledges alert by replying directly to it. Reply will stop escalation.

- Availability check
Two-way messaging allows to monitor who is available during an incident or emergency. This is particularly important, if you are notifying 100 people, but only 20 are needed for intervention. Once 20 have acknowledged ( by direct reply ) they are available, the incident will close automatically. The other 80 participants will be informed automatically their presence is not needed.

- Horizontal communication
During an alert procedure involving several participants, the replies should allow to inform everyone of who is intervening, avoiding the hassle of having to call colleagues in order to find out who is taking on the intervention

- Interactivity
During alert procedures launched and supervised by an operator, receiving explicit replies will allow him to efficiently manage the emergency, and to send additional information to selected groups.

- Intervention speed check
All intervention details being logged, an analysis of the time of replies and their content give valuable information to management during incident auditing and procedures improvement projects.