Blackberry’s Athoc Enhances Rapid Response Crisis Communications

BlackBerry, a global leader in secure mobile communications, has  announced that AtHoc, a division of BlackBerry, has released a new version of its market-leading crisis communications platform.

These new capabilities give AtHoc customers additional pre-planning resources and automated processing of crisis communication activities, to help resolve critical incidents with less manual intervention and fewer improvised, on-the-spot decisions.It also assists staff members in preparing for a wider range of emergency scenarios more easily, and in responding to crises faster with fully-automated business rules, outreach, and response.

“Critical events are inherently complex, and our customers have been asking for faster and more efficient ways to manage their crisis communications,” said Joseph Ng, Senior Director of Marketing and Strategy at AtHoc. “They want to be able to customize their workflow so that users understand the nature of threats sooner, and alerts are escalated faster. It’s all about business continuity and resilience, and we are proud to address those needs directly with this new release from AtHoc.”

AtHoc consistently monitors and evaluates the crisis communication discipline, and this updated platform directly addresses some of the core 2016 Crisis Communication Trends. It significantly simplifies the management of emergency situations with several new enhancements.

The Real-Time Alert Rules enables users to create rules for forwarding alerts received from external organizations and sources. Automated Staff Mustering,  a new fill count capability automatically contacts a roster of staff members who possess the right skills and training until the required number of people has been reached, and acknowledged their assignments. The Management Alerting is pre-configured to escalate rules that automatically alert supervisors when line staff cannot be reached, or decline an assignment for some reason. This enables managers to analyse an issue, and communicate the situation up the chain, requesting assistance from senior individuals. Finally, Severity-Codified Notifications is an easy-to-use template which enable organisations to designate the level of severity when setting up and issuing an alert.

These new innovations significantly improve rapid response time by turning complex business processes into efficient, effective, crisis communications to deliver faster, more automated actions. Many of these new functionalities have already deployed at major airports, maritime ports, large refinery operations centres, and at some of the world’s largest healthcare organisations, among other customers.