Why is a relevance engine better than mass notification?

Where do we start? Well perhaps on September 12, 2001 when the world realized we needed to communicate rapidly when bad things happen. While there were a few choices for emergency notification prior, we saw the effects of inadequate communication. So the “mass notification” market was born. Send one message to thousands, fast. Since then the market for mass notification, crisis notification, emergency notification systems has changed very little. Dialogic Communications ®, Mir3 ®, Everbridge ®, Send Word Now ®, AlertFind ®, Criticall ® and others have developed hosted mass notification systems.

We believe that while all of these fine firms do deliver mass notification on scale, none of them have been able to deliver on the heart of the need. We believe there is a real need for a communication process to match your specific business process. We believe that typing a message in a box and clicking send doesn’t meet the need of today’s sophisticated Enterprise Risk, Business Resilience, IT Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Management and Planning professional. We believe you must have a relevance engine that delivers the right information to the right person at the right time to deliver what your process needs. We believe you should be able to run the process like a process not a static scenario. We believe instant conference calls, war rooms, incident management, in depth scenarios and work flow are important. We believe replaying tests and incidents helps you get better. You should have the ability to use location, location based services, dynamic attributes and process based scenarios. So we believe there is still a long way to go in effective emergency notification and we’d like to work with you to continue to improve.

Why should you add a relevance engine to your help desk?

Ok so you’ve invested in BMC Remedy ®, CA Service Desk ®, HP Service Manager ®, Service-Now ®, Nimsoft Service Desk ® or any other help desk or customer support desk system and you’re thinking why do I need a relevance engine, doesn’t my service do that? Actually, no it does not.

No other product does what a relevance engine does, however many IT products do send alerts. Well actually, they all alert you. And therein lies your problem. Alert overload. From the help desk, from the NOC, from your operations systems and from your homegrown alerting applications.

We help you by stopping the madness and streamlining your processes. A leading retailer saved $8 million a year. A cloud provider, well, they saved $6 million a year. Oh and Vodafone, well, they saved customers by providing proactive service impact alerts from their help desk. Priceless.

Look, help desks are great at logging issues, updating status, documenting workflow and helping people make good decisions. That’s their job. However, when you add a relevance engine the game changes. When incidents are raised or changes are proposed the relevance engine leaps into action alerting only the person it should with the role-specific information the person wants. How does the engine know? Well it has a real time profile, dynamic information about the event and the person, the escalation process and so on. It’s really smart.

It’s delivered to the device the person has right now! Phone, email, sms, mms, pager, and so on. The person is found in their language instantly. Once found, based on their role they can take actions (“I got it” or “escalate it now”) or access the help desk from their smart phone or tablet. Yep they can accept the issue, look up more info, solve it, log it and move the workflow along all from the soccer field or tube station. If they can’t, the engine instantly escalates or perhaps grabs everyone needed for an all-hands conference call. Instantly. What has been saved? Well 15 people who didn’t need the alert, weren’t bothered. No one had to chase the resolvers down. The resolvers got what they wanted. The help desk was on to other issues. Time was not wasted, problems were fixed, and money was saved. So look to add a relevance engine to your help desk, every brand, and give your help desk a big boost!