2018 promises to be a challenging year for building, security, facility and business continuity managers. Those people tasked with ensuring the safety of employees, tenants, students or just visitors to a business premises, campus or residential building. The range of safety threats is wide and the pressure on responsible employees to have robust notification and evacuation plans in place is growing from regulators and from the public.
A vital part of such business or building incident response plans is a robust incident notification solution that can reach the people on site, quickly and with confidence. This might be to alert your emergency response team or simply to warn site visitors of an ongoing incident.
If you are a building, security, facility or business continuity manager who has been tasked with choosing and implementing a critical incident notification solution then the options facing you can be bewildering. How do you go about choosing a solution? How do you ensure value for money but also get the functionality you need? And how do you get started with implementing a solution?
To help you with this process, we have produced a guide to Getting Started with an Incident Notification Solution that is available free to download. One of the sections in the Guide covers common pitfalls to avoid when evaluating an incident notification solution. These include:
Don’t settle for creating your own solution or using free technology, such as WhatsApp, to create your own system. Free solutions cannot provide the scalability or functionality of paid for applications. Developing and maintaining your own bespoke application is a very expensive route to creating a less functional version than off-the-shelf solutions.
Go for a mobile, rather than website, centred application. Mobile is where the users are, smartphones offer multi-channel communications options and when an incident takes place, mobile may be the only option with website centred solutions difficult to operate if you are on the move.
Don’t pay for more than you need. Many notification solutions are high cost enterprise applications that offer far more functions than most users will ever need. They are also more complicated to onboard and operate in a crisis. Why pay for functions that you will not use and why risk over complicating your real-time crisis response.
Don’t commit to big upfront costs. Most notification solutions demand sizeable onboarding costs, only offered on annual subscription packages. This suits some larger enterprises, but not most businesses. Crises Control offers a low-cost self-implementation route and monthly subscription packages.
