The Communicator has traditionally been used in emergency response and disaster management, but the technology lends itself well to the communications side of business continuity.
Business continuity covers a wide range of responsibilities from building evacuation to relocating to the disaster response site. One common feature of all such scenarios is the need to communicate with tens, hundreds or even thousands of people in a short space of time.
Call-trees and manual systems are slow and rely largely on printed lists which are rarely completely accurate. On top of that, tracking who has been called and who has responded is all but impossible. SMS systems have major flaws; there is no real certainty that the message has been delivered, let alone been read or responded to. The phone may have been left at home or in the car, etc, so there is no way of knowing the status of anyone contacted in this manner.
The Communicator, on the other hand, closes the loop on communications by making telephone calls and actually speaking to the contact. It then asks questions such as, "Can you be on-site within 30 minutes?" to which the contacted person replies by pressing buttons on their telephone (9 for "yes" or 6 for "no", for example). If the contact is not reached using one number, The Communicator will automatically try others until the call is successfully completed. In addition, all calls are logged with date, time, number called, person called, call status and the person`s responses to questions asked. This information is immediately available on-screen or in reports.
The bottom line of all this is that communications are no longer a headache because The Communicator ensures that all required people are contacted and their current status is instantly available so decisions can be made much earlier in the process. Multiply this by the number of telephone lines available (4, 24, 96 or 200) and it becomes obvious how much faster The Communicator is than any manual system.
As an example, if 10 000 people had to be evacuated from a building it would be impossible to do a roll-call manually. If when each person reached safety, they called The Communicator and supplied a PIN when asked to do so, the whole process would take less than an hour with 72 telephone lines. In addition, the well-being or otherwise, of each person would be known, allowing appropriate response to be made.
Cirrus TechVue is currently setting up a Hosting Centre which for a monthly fee will provide customers with a completely managed, outsourced implementation of The Communicator. All contact details will be hosted and calls automatically made as and when required.
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