Alerting and Mobilisation

Social media and news outlets will often be the first sources of information for large scale incidents, therefore it is important to ensure that your organisation has tried and tested processes for distributing messages quickly. How does your business ensure that you can quickly and efficiently alert internal and external parties?

Most organisations have a procedure in place to deal with events, however these vary significantly in terms of their quality, speed and effectiveness. CIM clients use our alerting and notification module in several ways, including:

• To mobilise an emergency response or crisis management team
• To warn and inform employees, stakeholders, or customers about an adverse event
• To establish the status of those who might have been affected by an incident
• To quickly ascertain the location of certain employees

Build Up Your Own Templates

It’s clear that there are many reasons that an organisation will need to send out targeted, accurate alerts. CIM’s Messaging module uses email, SMS and text-to-voice functionality that gives you the power to perform all the tasks above and more. Pre-defined templates enable you to send customised, accurate communications at the touch of a button, which can be based on for example, incident type or location. The flexibility of the tool allows recipients (both internal and external) to be added or removed as required, even if they are not registered in the system.

Feedback is Essential

Multi-channel notification ensures that if the incident occurs outside of office hours, the chance of your team remembers receiving information is greatly increased.

It also allows you to set up response profiles, whereby recipients can:

• Email a response back into the system
• Send an SMS to a dedicated number, which will then be displayed in the system
• Click a link in an email or SMS to provide their ETA at the crisis management facility
• Acknowledge or respond to a text-to-voice message by pressing a defined number on the keypad
• Provide their location during a geographically sensitive incident

All responses to these messages are logged within the module and can be published to the incident log as required. Should a conference call with the crisis management team be necessary, the system can also initiate this, automatically dialling people in.

Position-Based Alerting

Using CIM, you can send messages to all users and contacts or you can import recipient lists from other internal systems (LDAP, CSV, XML, XLSX / XLS supported). Recipients may choose to make themselves visible on your CIM operation panel and if required, both the recipient and the operator can initiate encrypted web chat. An operator can use CIM’s messaging functionality to send information to geographically located recipients / groups or individuals, which, along with access to different map services and background maps, can help create a more comprehensive situation plot.