FYI: Email Alerting Isn’t Enough

Email alerting is an inefficient way to receive and address critical alerts. Email inboxes tend to get flooded with “clutter,” as irrelevant messages bury urgent incident notifications. Incident management procedures require incident management systems, ensuring that urgent issues are immediately addressed. 

Yet, some services are reluctant to say goodbye to email alerting and its inefficiencies. This is the case with Google Voice, which recently solidified its commitment to email alerting. Now, Voice users can’t integrate the service with an incident management system; instead, they’re required to use their Gmail accounts to forward or receive important voicemails.

In this post, we’ll examine Google Voice’s latest update and discuss the cons associated with email alerting. 

It’s Time to Ditch Your Inbox

It’s important to understand that email inboxes aren’t incident management systems. With email alerting, there’s no way of differentiating between irrelevant, everyday messages and high-priority emails. Accordingly, incident responders dismiss the importance of an email or misinterpret the context of the critical message.

Email doesn’t provide alert-until-read functionalities or constant alerting. If an incident responder misses a critical email, she or he won’t receive persistent alerts for the message waiting for them. Simply put, if the critical email is missed, it’s likely that it would never get addressed and resolved.  

The large quantity of emails received also results in alert fatigue. Alert fatigue is the feeling of exhaustion and dissatisfaction resulting from receiving an excessive number of messages. This takes a mental toll on incident responders, who continue to receive emails without context or message severity. 

Google Voice Says “Yes” to Gmail

The latest Google Voice update prevents voicemail forwarding to non-Gmail accounts. This means that Voice messages can’t be received through an incident management system’s email domain. Essentially, Voice no longer integrates with an incident management system or mobile alerting software. 

Again, email is not enough. Gmail doesn’t provide insight into Voice message severity and it’s not equipped with alert-until-read capabilities. With Gmail, critical voicemails will fall through the cracks during time-sensitive situations. 

Replace Your Inbox With OnPage Dedicated Lines

OnPage dedicated lines allow customers to leave a voicemail that’s routed directly to the responder’s OnPage alerting application. To initiate the process, customers simply dial a specific, dedicated number provided by the OnPage service and leave a voicemail regarding their urgent issues. 

Unlike Gmail, OnPage dedicated lines are equipped with persistent, intrusive high-priority alerts on mobile. Getting instant notifications of critical issues enables responders to immediately address customer voicemails. High-priority alerts (with voicemail attachments) are brought to the forefront and ensures no incident goes unaddressed. 

Dedicated lines decrease the responder’s mean time to repair (MTTR) with speedy responses. At its core, incident management systems together with dedicated lines, help streamline customer-to-responder communications. 

Email alerting is an antiquated, ineffective way of forwarding or receiving urgent messages. Incident response teams require a robust incident management system, ensuring that they’re quickly notified of customer issues to achieve maximum client satisfaction.