What’s next? Key trends in critical communications, part 1

Believe it or not, the first quarter of 2015 is about to come to a close. Is it just me, or does it feel like this year will be over before we know it?

Before that happens, let’s take a moment to slow things down, and take a quick look ahead at some of the key trends that we will continue to be focused on over the rest of the year and beyond. This is a two part series, so bear with us. Please don’t look at these as predictions, but rather, as areas where we continue to see an implicit opportunity for technology to shape new levels of critical communication context, efficiency and precision.  Here goes:

Location, Location, Location: Enterprise mobility, global workforces, multi-modal messaging…all these key buzzword rely on the power of location. Our state and local government clients have long harnessed the power of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and map-based targeting  to effectively reach their residents with critical information, no matter their location. Now, finally, it looks like the private sector is not only catching up, but coming up with new and innovative ways to leverage location services. Many of our corporate clients are changing how they view location for business continuity planning, situational intelligence and emergency communications. Instead of building contact lists based on pre-defined locations and addresses, they are now using map-based targeting to more effectively and precisely reach key employees and stakeholders.

For instance, businesses can target their traveling, global workforce by delivering relevant notifications or alerts to employees that manually check-in to a given location. Similarly, at Everbridge, we continue to develop new functionality to track employees across all of their global facilities and buildings to ensure that only the relevant employees are alerted, and accounted for, when a critical situation arises.

Critical Customer Communications: Technology is constantly changing the way that we communicate and collaborate with customers, partners and other stakeholders during disruptive events (from IT incidents, outages and data breaches to weather-related events, and more). It used to be that businesses had very limited and inelegant ways to reach these people during these critical times—manual call trees, email blasts, even limited, traditional emergency notification services. However, new innovations continue to improve our ability to deliver relevant, automated communications that foster proactive customer service and support.

In today’s modern business environment this is critical: Unpredictability is rising (IT security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, emergencies, etc), and customers require immediate communications to keep their trust. If we have learned anything lately, it is that transparency with customers is key—ineffective, slow or untimely customer communications can only exacerbate the original problem (as they say, “the cover up is worse than the crime.”)

With that said, check back soon for Part two, as I will continue to preview some of the key industry trends that will define our market.