It’s that time of year again when school bells will soon be ringing if they haven’t already.
Whether students will be attending in-person, synchronous, or asynchronous learning, there is a need for communicating with parents by delivering important information or emergency messages via telephone calls.
If your school or district sends out voice calls on a routine basis, then you are probably aware that when a call from the school lands in a parent’s voicemail, a parent worried about the safety of their children and concerned that there is an emergency will automatically hit “Callback” to speak to someone instead of listening to the message left by the mass notification system.
If a parent listened to the voicemail message that was sent in its entirety, they would have all of the information that they need, instead of panicking and dialing back to inquire about the call.
During an actual emergency, parents dialing in is a distraction to those that need to support the school’s efforts to deal with the emergency at hand. As a result, it creates additional work for administrators that answer calls for the school or district.
There is a solution that will get parents to listen to the message you send and eliminates all of those nuisance calls. The solution is to implement a Toll-Free Number as your outgoing Caller ID.
The idea behind this feature is when a voicemail message is left on a parent’s, student’s or staff’s phone and they hit “Callback,” the notification system will identify who it is that is calling and plays back the last message that was sent to “that” particular number.
In fact, a great mass notification system will playback all of the messages sent to that number over a 24-hour period and play them all back in reverse chronological order. Think of the time and money saved by implementing this feature. Think of how happy your administrative support person will be by not having to answer numerous calls and repeat the same message over and over again.
Schools and districts can publish this number to parents, students, and staff so that they know calls from the school will come from this number, and so they can program this number into their phones with the school’s name. It’s that simple.
When seeking a mass notification system that has a breadth of features, be sure to check if the system has a Toll-Free Number feature to use as your outgoing Caller ID. The bottom line, this feature is efficient and a timesaver when communicating important information.
