As more and more business is done online, customers have come to expect a high level of service every hour of every day. With the right kind of Web presence, that’s easier to accomplish than ever before. Technology being what it is, however, something will always go wrong.
Systems lag. Website response slows. The wheels of commerce grind to a halt.
But to Frans Boejé, monitoring specialist, I&O monitoring and security at a.s.r., a “stuff happens” attitude is unacceptable. That’s why his company has turned to mass notification.
a.s.r., one of the Netherlands’ largest insurers, employs nearly 3,900 employees and earned revenue of € 3.8 billion in 2014. Like many companies of its size, a.s.r. has grown by acquiring other companies—which means it has a variety of systems and websites that require constant attention to manage and support.
Understandably for an insurer, continuity and trust are of great importance to a.s.r.—as well as to the company’s customers. To ensure that trust, a.s.r. systems and sites must be available at all times; if they are compromised or threatened in any way, things need to get back into working order as soon as possible.
Before implementing mass notification, a.s.r. used personnel from a control center that had been in place since the company first started working with large mainframe systems.
But because of the vastly improved reliability of today’s systems, operators in that control center did little else besides monitor the IT environment.
If a website went down or network response lagged, the central team of 16 operators who comprised the control center would begin to call technical engineers to find someone to fix the problem.
And at night, things grew more complicated. The team would first check a spreadsheet to determine who was on standby, then start dialing. If a person didn’t answer with a specified amount of time, a call would go out to the next person on the list. If a technician wasn’t found quickly enough, calls would be escalated to a manager.
If ever there were a situation crying out for mass notification, it was that of a.s.r.
Accordingly, in his attempts to streamline the process and make it more efficient and effective, Boejé explored the use of mass notification technology to automate his monitoring and alerting operations. His team chose the MIR3 Intelligent Notification system to work with their existing ITSM system, so alerts could automatically be delivered by text, email and phone to suitable technicians.
To learn more about how Boejé and a.s.r. integrated mass notification technology with their existing systems—and to find out about the results they achieved—download the case study.
Learn more about mass notification with How to Use Automated Notification to Support IT Incident Management.
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