Message Received: Crisis Communication Systems

Crisis communication systems automate the process of contacting employees in an emergency

The recent bombings in London had many CSOs scrambling to find out if their employees were in that city and if they were safe. Cell phone bills in businesses around the globe likely registered a marked uptick in minutes as security executives initiated telephone call trees by calling Frank, who then called Sally and Murph, who then called Alec and Francisco and Stella, and so on down the line. Given the number of people that needed to be contacted, a lot of dialers likely ended up getting voice mails or even a "this number is no longer in service" recording or two, making the job of tracking employees a hit or miss proposition during the early stages of the crisis. In the meantime, CSOs sweated it out, waiting until the moment they could check off the last employee on their list as present and accounted for.

A technology that automates the â¬Stried but perhaps not so trueâ¬ manual calling process aims to help companies communicate with employees faster and more accurately during times of emergency. We first wrote about this technology in August 2004. Since then, the list of vendors has expanded and the systems have become faster. Companies can now broadcast messages to any number of people via different channels, within seconds.

One company hawking its wares in the mass notification system space is National Notification Network (3N). (Other companies making mass notification systems include Advanced Continuity, Dialogic Communications, Enera, EnvoyWorldWide, MessageOne and SWN Communications.) Cinta Putra, CEO and cofounder of the Glendale, Calif.-based application services provider, says the idea for 3N was hatched after 9/11, when she and one of her business partners decided there had to be a more effective way to communicate with all the people displaced following the attacks. "We took that concept—communicating to many—and said it should be as simple as communicating to one," she says.

The companyâ¬"s system, called 3N InstaCom, was launched in October 2003. It allows users to create a voice or text message (or grab a prepared one from a message library), then contact the system by phone or the Internet, which then broadcasts the message to recipients via phone, e-mail, pager, PDA, fax, IM or SMS (short message service). Employees can choose the order of the channel; that is, someone can request to be contacted by cell phone first, then e-mail, then IM and so on. The system can cycle through the channels until it can confirm that the person has been contacted.