Welcome back to our series, 8 Solutions to Resolve IT Incidents Faster. For our fifth strategy, we’re looking at how to prevent unnecessary redundancy in an organization’s communication systems.
Symptoms: Missed, Duplicated, Ignored and Unsent Messages
Look at communication system overlap as a possible root cause of problems where the right people don’t know what they need to when they need to- even though the information was available.
Production team didn’t get the email? Maybe it didn’t get sent to the right person, or maybe it was buried in a pile of unread, irrelevant memos and emails. Maybe email wasn’t the right channel at all-- but who was responsible for knowing that and switching over the paging system?
By the way, how much did that missed email/page cost you in:
- Customer satisfaction?
- Lost labor hours finding the right people and then fixing a preventable problem?
- SLA contract penalties?
What about your reporting? When your department tries to account for productivity or forecast for staffing, do your numbers reflect the ability of the organization, or do they tell a story of time lost to communicating the same things over and over?
These are solvable problems.
You Have an Overlap of Communication Systems
How much of that sounds familiar? Automated communication solutions increase the speed and expand the reach of your important communications by reaching people on more channels. Add a system that allows for receipt and read confirmations, and now you can focus on getting to the people who don’t know instead of trying to figure out who was supposed to know.
When an automatic alarm tells the right people the right things at the right times, your staff can focus on the jobs you hired them for.
Why Does This Happen?
As companies grow, reorganize, and/or acquire, different teams may come equipped with different communication solutions.
For example, the incident management team may use a free mobile app while the network monitoring team may rely on traditional call trees and phones/voicemails. When interdepartmental communication is required, multiple communication systems hamper the ability to collaborate and messages get lost.
What is the Solution?
Companies need to unify their critical communication so that teams throughout the organization are communicating critical information through one platform.
In addition to streamlining the transfer of information, this ensures that information is presented in a consistent manner. For example, ticketing data points can be standardized so teams can anticipate what to expect, and a good platform will build this into the messaging format.
Communication is a critical key to success for organizations, and keeping all departments on the same page will help with the transfer of information and therefore the success of the company to get tasks completed.
Contact HipLink Software to Get Started
Overlaps in communication systems can be frustrating at best and costly at worst. Let’s get your organization unified on one communication platform.
HipLink Software has been the premier provider of critical event communication software to global organizations of all sizes for over twenty years. Do you have questions about how to automate your IT responses to decrease downtime? If you would like to send us a message, request a demo, or download a trial, please feel free to contact us today to get started.