SENDING VOICE ALERTS

Easily add feature-rich voice call capabilities
to you mass notification solution

Why voice is a must
for sending intrusive alerts

Voice calls are still the most attention grabbing, intrusive way to get your message heard – a ringing phone insists on a response. Furthermore it is one of the most feature rich channels you can integrate into a solution. There is so much you can do with voice calls, from the basics of making a call through to creating complex call flows involving IVR and conferencing capabilities.

Whilst voice may not be a preferred communications channel, especially for younger generations, it is the most effective way to get attention. For this reason voice remains the top choice for sending time critical alerts.

Perhaps of equal importance are the commanding, reassuring qualities of a voice call. Phone calls remain the primary way to consistently convey a personal, human voice to an audience. And for people in distress hearing a clear and calm voice that can succinctly provide advice, instruction or directions is vital.

How is voice used across mass outbound applications

At a glance

Mass emergency notifications

Severe weather

Accident

Act or terrorism

Natural disaster

Business disaster

Appointment reminders

Hospitals

Outpatients

Dentists

Doctors

Education

Surveys

Local government

Community

Education

Retail

Customer engagement

Order updates

Account updates

Delivery status

Promotions

Planned maintenance

Meter readings

Gas

Electricity

Water

Voice integration
key considerations

When using voice to deliver critical notifications, a number of factors need to be considered to ensure; not only vast volumes of calls can be made, but that as many are made as quickly as possible – initiating multiple calls per second; that the voice message conveys and contains all the key elements required to ensure a message is heard, understood and acted upon; that respondents can easily interact with the system; that voice calls can be scheduled and cancelled; and finally delivery status can be monitored. Using the simple Alerting Hub API all these factors can be addressed to meet the specific requirements of your solution.

The voice alert

For a voice alert to have maximum impact and generate the desired response, a number of different message components may need to be included. Through Alerting Hub’s voice API you can incorporate all of them into your solution.

CLI modifications – Instil confidence in respondents that the call is from a trusted source, is genuine and deserves attention
Message played – play a pre-recorded message or use TTS
DTMF feedback – enable simple acceptance of the message, with barge-in capability
IVR functionality – use DTMF to trigger additional events such as transferring call to live agent or placing called party into a conference

Volume, speed & resilience

Alerting Hub partners with a number of service providers to ensure not just high volumes of calls can be placed but that all calls can be made as quickly as possible – one call initiated per second as standard with higher calls per second available on request.

But handling large call volumes, quickly is just one side of the story – ensuring all calls are made is equally important. The Alerting Hub platform is resilient by design. Load balancing between service providers and alerting platform hubs is default, service provider failures are routed around. In short if a call needs to get out, it will get out.

Scheduling mass outbound calls

The ability to schedule when a voice-based alert is sent can bring greater flexibility to your solutions and help safeguard against alerts being sent by mistake. Using the Alerting Hub API you have a number of options.

Immediate – the system administrator either creates from scratch or selects from a template the .wav file to be played and who to – and then hits the send button
Confirmation – to help ensure messages aren’t sent in error, scheduling can be incorporated into the process enabling a “Are you sure you want to send this” request prior to the system administrator confirming the message is to be sent
Scheduled – A voice alert can be schedule to go out on a particular day, time or date. In the event of a hazard – an incoming storm – a system administrator can create the alert and then choose when the alerts should be sent out. Different alerts being sent according to where the storm is
Cancellation of scheduled alert – finally you need the ability to cancel a scheduled alert

Monitoring the delivery status of voice alerts

In the event of an emergency it is critical that, from the point a call is made, you can monitor the delivery status of each message to every designated recipient. The system can then trigger follow-on actions in the event a call fails or a recipient hasn’t confirmed that they are ok. With Alerting Hub this data can be gleaned in two ways – polled or real-time (event driven)

Event driven – notification of when something has happened (real time) – we will report on every state change on every call made – delivered to a designated end point such as a web server
Polled – at any point you can poll for updates on delivery/task completions

Integrate voice into a multi channel alerting solution

Voice-based alerts can bring many advantages to a mass notification system, but sending alerts through a number of different channels is often the best way to ensure the message gets through. For this reason it is important to use a platform that has access to multiple channels of communication. Alerting Hub can support alerts being sent via SMS, Voice, email and more.

Full capability

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