As the world grappled with the recent bushfires, drought, flooding, and now COVID-19 – it is clear that fast, effective critical event management and communications are the number one success factors for most organizations.
However, the same events have also highlighted how that many critical event management communications platforms lack the key functionality needed for fast and insightful engagement with key stakeholders.
As such, let’s take a look at five key factors that should be considered in your quest for a fast and effective critical communications platform.
1. Real-time Communications Dashboard
Wouldn’t it be great to see delivered and received messages update instantly as you send a mass notification?
An effective critical communication platform would feature a fully interactive, real-time communications dashboard. Look for communications platforms with an intuitive dashboard that is simple to navigate and enables you to perform all your communication functions in one place.
2. Critical Event Management Analytics for Messages and Responses
You’ve just sent a mass notification broadcast to 50,000 stakeholders. How can you quickly identify who needs help?
An effective critical communication platform would display live statistics that are updated in real-time with your message send rate, successful deliveries, replies and visual graphs of any polled responses. Only then could you quickly triage your stakeholders, manage critical event information and immediately connect with those requiring assistance.
3. Powerful Critical Event Management Reporting
During a critical event, hundreds of messages are sent with high volumes of replies being received. This amount of information is a statistical nightmare for anyone trying to disseminate the data and isolate the key information required.
An effective critical communication platform should have powerful filtering and reporting tools, enabling you to rapidly cut through the information clutter. Look for functionality that allow for quick report building with deep analytics and insights.
These statistics may amplify your ability to make smarter decisions during a critical event. Consider communications platforms that enable you to quickly search, share, download and export the reporting information you need.
4. Quickly Compose Messages
During a critical event, you don’t want to be wasting precious time composing a message or logging into a separate mass notification system.
An effective critical event management system should allow you to quickly compose a message (or easily access pre-approved message templates) from anywhere in the system, broadcast a mass notification to all stakeholders or selected key stakeholders, quickly activate teams and poll your recipients
5. Unified Chat Capability
Since COVID-19, many organisations have shifted from the traditional office environment to home offices, and adopted enterprise collaboration tools such as MS Teams and Slack on a large scale.
The ability for a critical communications platform to integrate with these tools is beneficial for your organisation, so your stakeholders do not need to learn new systems. A powerful critical communication platform should have functionality for you to instantly connect with stakeholders by initiating chat conversations within the system, and allow recipients to receive messages through their communication platform of choice – whether it be via email, sms, MS Teams, Slack, or WhatsApp.
Consider a system where you will be able to send a unified message to multiple channels, track conversations and initiate flow-on conversations, instead of static asynchronous communications.
There are only a handful of critical event management platforms with these powerful communications functionality available.
The critical event management platform – CQ is one of these few systems and worth exploring. The platform has recently rolled out an interactive communications dashboard, live analytics, in-depth reporting and a compose message slider, and are currently working on unified chat capability – due to roll out over the next couple of months.
Explore CQ and chat to the team for a free demo.
