🕒 2 min read
By Emily Byrne, Marketing Manager at Track24 & AtlasNXT
The war in Ukraine, political unrest and an increased terror threat at home and away mean, as of 2022, critical communications have never been so important. It is essential enterprises, businesses and organisations keep their employees safe and accounted for, whether they are working in high-risk environments overseas or on home soil, or going about their day-to-day business. At Track24, we provide a seven step guide to ensuring you have the best critical communications platform at your disposal.
Look out for location intelligence and services
Location intelligence and services ensure you can quickly locate your staff and assets on a map, in the event of a critical incident or when needing to be situationally aware. Many critical communications providers enable emergency alerting and channels for response, though can they offer 3D communications? 3D communications harness location intelligence and services to deliver messages based on the who, the where and the what, allowing you to answer the most important question: “Who are my people, where are my people and where should they be?” Ensure your message is delivered at the right time, to the right people, in the right place. Choose a system which can cut through the noise of modern enterprise communications and filter information for you, to make your life easier when protecting your people.
Master mass notifications
Use mass notifications to ensure your staff are easily alertable, able to raise alerts and confirm whether they are safe, whether in any situation or location. Critical communications can be sent via one-way messages, two-way messages, or broadcast messages. Optimised critical communications platforms will provide all three capabilities. One-way communications might be notifications or alerts sent from operator or administrator to end-user, two-way communications allow the end-user to respond, for example, with their safety status and broadcast messages enable messages to be exchanged between groups of people, which the operator or administrator creates.
Consider curated data feeds
Some systems even use AI and curated data feeds to analyse incident data, news feeds and other relevant sources of information to predict the probability of a critical event occurring. Curated data feeds enable your enterprise to take a proactive, rather than reactive approach to critical communications. After all, “the worst crisis is the one you didn’t foresee”.
Discover document management
Make sure your evacuation and crisis management plans are easily accessible to the right people, at the right time, at the right location. Have the relevant, correct and updated information to hand, no matter what the location or situation. Does your entire workforce know where to find documents? To ensure the safety of your people in the case of any situation or critical event, make sure they have everything they need at their fingertips.
Ensure lone workers are easily accountable for
It’s generally estimated there are over 6 million lone workers in the UK, as of 2022.
Are your lone workers included in your communication loop? Many critical communications providers have messaging features exclusively for your lone workers. Be sure to determine whether active tracking permissions are in the hands of the end-user, so your chosen solution respects your employees’ privacy at all times.
AtlasNXT’s protect module, Overwatch, enables you to fulfill a duty of care to your employees and their families, keeping them safe anywhere, any time. End-users always provide consent to be tracked, meaning their privacy is protected.
Choose a user-friendly platform
According to Toptal and App Institute, “90% of users who stop using an app do so because of poor user experience.” Source. Make the most of demos and trial periods when getting to grips with using a new critical communications platform.
Jessi Ginther, Senior Director of Operations at Center for Civilians in Conflict summaries how Track24 provide user-friendly software to help protect their people:
“Track24 provides us the reassurance we need when travelling to insecure environments all around the world. Their software is user friendly, permitting staff to easily understand how to use and alert us, as necessary.”
Is the software you’re thinking of using for critical communications something your staff will be able to easily use on a day-to-day basis, even in remote locations?
Choose a system with superb customer support
It’s important to choose a critical communications provider who can offer you support whenever you need it, perhaps 24/7.
Serving as an example of how AtlasNXT uses location services to benefit your organisation, a leading Global Risk Management Organisation said the following:
“Track24 has been outstanding both in terms of knowledge sharing and more general help. The teams in both Dubai and London are a huge asset to the company and provide very swift response times to queries and strive to resolve any issues as efficiently as possible.”
Helping your people and providing customer satisfaction and support is at the forefront of everything we do at Track24 and AtlasNXT. It’s a great idea to use a service like Trustpilot to get an idea of the level of customer support your possible provider can deliver. Remember, you deserve only the best!
Here at Track24, we’ve provided you with a useful guide for both choosing a critical communications provider and ensuring your people are informed in the event of a crisis.
To find out more about AtlasNXT, our next-generation location intelligence platform, click here: https://atlasnxt.com