Übersicht
Providing emergency assistance is standard practice for most large international companies. Some companies build their own Global Security Operations Centers (GSOCs). In contrast, others rely on external emergency assistance providers or provide it indirectly through other services and products such as travel insurance.
Whether you have your own GSOC or are a security or medical assistance provider, an assistance procedure often starts with: a phone call from an employee that needs help.
Challenge
If an employee needs help, they must find the phone number for the assistance center. It can be on a plastic card, a paper note, or a contact number in their phone. More commonly, employees are contacting a close work colleague that can look it up for them. A common problem with this is that the phone number is outdated because the employer switched supplier, and many employees have not updated the number because it is used so seldom.
Once the employee has the correct phone number and calls the emergency assistance center, the operator receiving the call will be confronted with several challenges.
The operator must find out who is calling, what company they work for, what the emergency is, where they are located, and how they can be reached.
An operator must know all these things before they can begin to assist the employee in the actual emergency. Depending on the emergency, the operator may also need to gather even more information like the employee’s insurance policy, medical records, travel bookings, etc.
The operator gathers this information by going through a list of questions on the initial call. This only works well when the employee is calm, knows where they are, and has a good phone connection. The reality is, that the caller is often distressed, calling from an unknown location, and has a poor phone connection which can make the questioning process very challenging for both the operator and the employee.
Moreover, assistance centers only assist in selected languages, predominantly English, while many of the employees in need of assistance have English as a second or third language. Therefore, the employees might have trouble expressing themselves in languages catered by the assistance center, which is worsened by a poor phone line in a stressful situation.
This puts a lot of pressure on the operator receiving the call and can be a huge frustration for the employee trying to get assistance. Unfortunately, worst case scenario results in the employee not receiving any help at all.
Solution
The Safeture platform provides a solution for all of this.
The employee opens the Safeture App and presses the emergency button that automatically dials the correct phone number during an emergency.
The phone number for the emergency button is configured per customer account and can be changed centrally. This solves both problems of employees needing to carry the emergency phone number on a card and updating the phone number if it’s changed.
The Safeture App will automatically send a data signal to servers letting the operator in the assistance center know all relevant information about the employee calling. The data signal will tell them who is calling, where they are located, and all other required information about the employee.
The result is that the operator can immediately start assisting the employee with their emergency and skip the questioning process. If the call is disconnected, the operator has all the necessary information and can reach back out to the employee and their employer.
For usage without Safeture App
The use case above is based on the employee having the Safeture App installed on their phone. Please see referenced document below on how to increase the install rate. If the employee does not have the Safeture App installed, the Safeture platform can still support the operator in the assistance process by using only the phone number as a cross-reference.
The Safeture platform stores employee phone numbers and connects them through either travel bookings or integrated systems (i.e., identity platforms or HR databases). This allows the operator to quicky find the information about the caller (name, company, email, travel bookings, etc.), without the questioning process and all the associated challenges.
Having the Safeture platform will result in:
- State of the art customer experience
- First-rate assistance process
- Faster assistance
- Fewer misunderstandings during the initial call
- Managing disconnected calls or calls with poor connections
- Providing valuable information in the case of a language barrier between the employee and the assistance center.
