Communication Module

Overview

The Communication Module offers a reliable and fast way to mass-communicate with your people in critical situations.

You can communicate with groups or individuals through One-Way Messages (email and SMS) or through Chats. The Communication module enables you to select recipients based on different types of shared parameters such as location, behavior, travel bookings, place of work, emergencies, tags, group belonging, and so on. The platform will inform you if the message was sent successfully or not.

Thanks to its advanced routing engine for sending SMS, you will achieve much higher deliverability rates. In practice, this means that if the system detects problems during sending, it will try alternative sending routes and retry sending up to 50 times to achieve the highest deliverability possible.

If you want to access old chats or messages, they can be found under archived chats and in the message log.

Click here to see a step-by-step guide on how to send a message through the Safeture Platform.

Message types and channels

There are two different interfaces for sending a message – as a new chat or a new one-way message (email and/or SMS). Read more about chats and one-way messages below.

You can send each message either as a chat, email, and/or SMS.

Chats

With chats, you can start two-way communication with any selected users. After initiating a chat, the recipients will get an email, a push notification to the Safeture app (if they have access to it), and an SMS (if enabled in the message settings before starting the chat) with a chat invitation like this one:

The chat can then be accessed by the user, with or without the Safeture app. From the chat, the end-user can tick a box called “I’m OK” to let the Administrator know that they are safe. They can also write any details on the situation in the message field.

Target the ones that have not responded “I’m OK”

In the Chats interface, you can quickly see the number of recipients that have responded: “I’m OK”. With this information, you can quickly identify your remaining risks as a Security Manager and focus your efforts on the right assets to complete the incident response process. You can immediately initiate a new chat only with the ones that have not responded that they are OK.

One-way messages

One-way messages should be used when the Administrator does not expect any replies from the recipients. Examples could be any general safety advice or information to a selected group of assets. The Administrator can still send out the same message to multiple recipients at once, but with the only difference that the recipients are unable to reply.

Email is the default communication channel for one-way messages, but in the sending options, you can also choose to send it as an SMS as well. By doing so, you increase the likelihood of the recipient seeing the information faster despite a potentially limited internet connection.

Sending options

Include as SMS

This option will result in the message being sent both as a chat/email and SMS.

High-quality SMS

In the sending options, you are given the choice to send a high-quality SMS, which is the term used for the advanced SMS routing engine developed by Safeture, where the system will try alternative routes and multiple re-sends if the delivery fails. Note that this might come at a slightly higher cost compared to standard SMS.

Are you OK request

By enabling this, your message to the end-user will contain a box that the recipients can tick to mark that they are ok. This will result in the Admin being able to distinguish those that are not ok and reach out once again to those specifically.

Allow users to see each other’s messages.

This is a setting offered when starting a chat. By enabling this, all members of the chat will be able to see what the others are answering. If you do not wish for them to be able to do so, let this option be turned off.

Send message to managers only.

This sending option is relevant only if you are sending a message to contacts of a facility. When turning this option on, only the facility contacts that are marked as managers in their contact profiles will receive your message.

Methods for selecting recipients

There are two primary ways of selecting recipients within the Communication Module; Quick add and Advanced Filtering. Read more about those methods below.

Note there are also message buttons across the whole platform, especially in the Dashboard, Partner Dashboard that lets you quickly message people that are in a high-risk country, currently traveling, or with any other shared parameters.

You can also select a group of people by marking an area on the map in the Security Overview with the Quick Selector tool.

Quick add

The search bar in the interface for sending a message lets you quickly add recipients by simply searching for a facility, end-user, group, or dynamic recipient filter.

Dynamic recipient filters

With dynamic filters, administrators can save any kind of filtering of recipients for later use. This enables you to filter out recipients on certain parameters with the click of a button. This saves you a lot of time and is a great tool if you send messages to the same group of people often.

Note that not all users will necessarily meet the same filtering criteria at different points in time. For example, if the filtering has been done based on location, then the recipients might vary depending on where end-users are when the message is being sent.

Advanced filtering

Advanced filtering offers a more powerful way to select recipients. You can select recipients based on several different parameters such as an end-user’s location on the map, their last contact with the app, if they are currently traveling, if they have an upcoming travel booking to a certain destination, etcetera. After selecting your desired parameters, you can save those settings as a dynamic recipient filter to use in the future.

You access the advanced filtering feature by clicking the green link with the text “Advanced Filtering” in the part of the interface where you select recipients.

You can filter your people based on any of the following parameters:

Country: Filter users that are currently located within one or more countries. Note that Facilities are not supported in this filter yet.
Emergency: Filter out users that has an active Emergency.
Group: Filter users based on the group they belong to.
Home: Include users based on if they are, or are not, located in the country they have set to “home”. Note that enabling this filter will automatically exclude all facilities, since this state is not set.
Last App Contact: Only include app users whose app has been sending a report to the Safeture system within a certain time. Note that setting this filter will automatically exclude all non-app users, i.e., travel booking generated users.
Map Selection: Option to draw a shape on a map and include any users and facilities within the area. The latest 300 Incidents are plotted on the map for reference.
Tags: Search for users and facilities with one or more tags set.
Type of recipient: Filter facilities or users only.
Upcoming travel bookings to IATA: Filter traveling users based on one or more IATA codes (airport codes) during a pre-defined time period. The IATA codes will include any booking with the IATA code attached, i.e., flights, hotels and rental cars. If the booking does not user IATA codes the traveling user will not be included, which depends on the source of the booking data.
Upcoming travel bookings to region: Same as above, but filter based on the entire country instead of separate IATA codes.
Past travel booking to IATA/Region: Same as above, but filter out historic bookings instead of upcoming ones.

Click here for a guide on how to use this feature.

Templates

Save your message settings as a template and lower your incident response time or time put into communicating with your people.

After sending a message you can choose to save the settings you just made – i.e., the chosen recipient filters, sending options, and message content as a template to re-user the next time you are going to communicate to the same group or when a similar situation has occurred.

Note: Templates are separate for Chats and One-way Messages, meaning that you cannot access a Chat Template when sending a new One-way Message and vice versa.