Siren

The System for Incident Response and Emergency Notification (SIREN) provides another dimension to ARCOS. SIREN supports incident response team notification with acknowledgement of message delivery by providing the ability to create and view notifications as well as the ability to create Custom Messages that accompany the notification.

SIREN calls all contacts on the selected lists and delivers a customized message. Contacts can be required to acknowledge receipt of messages or the system can simply call contacts, deliver the message, and report the call results without requiring acknowledgement from the recipient.

There are two, unique Callout Types provided with SIREN screen: Notification and Notification (No Response). These types are defined to:

• Play a Custom Message

• Not speak a callout reason

• Not speak job classification

• Call ALL contacts on the selected list

• Ignore all Schedules

• Not put called contacts on working status for Accept

Both callout types can be set to allow Blast Calling, in which all of a contact's devices are called simultaneously.

These notification types also allow contacts and employees in the standard crew callout ARCOS database to be eligible for Notification of callouts without incurring charges or credits based on their confirming or not confirming receipt of the notification message. There are three buttons available on the basic SIREN tab: Create, View, and Custom Msgs.

The Notification callout type script requires contact input to verify receipt of the message. If the contact responds by pressing "1" during the initial Welcome message, the Custom Message is played followed by an option to either repeat the message or confirm receipt of the message. If "2" is pressed during the initial Welcome message, indicating the contact is not home, SIREN leaves a message asking the contact to respond via the Automated Voice Response System and leaves a callback number for the contact to call.

SIREN notifications can also contact employees via e-mail. As part of the Employee page, if your company has this capability, you can enter up to three e-mail addresses that can be made active for a callout/notification. If an employee or contact is set to receive e-mail notifications, the e-mail goes out before any calls to the employee's devices are made. E-mail addresses are not displayed on any roster and recipients of callout e-mails may not reply to the e-mail. E-mails are represented in the Callout Detail Report with a sub-attempt of "e" for e-mail and are a source type in Log Trace.

E-mails sent from a callout/notification contain the callout/notification ID, type, description, reason, the e-mail ID to which the message was sent, and any custom message text that was created and associated with the callout/notification e-mail. If the E-mail checkbox is checked on the Notification Edit page, ARCOS will send e-mails to contacts with e-mail addresses active as well as running calls as usual. If the E-mail Only checkbox is checked, the callout/notification is directed to e-mail addresses ONLY and no phone calls are made.

For all sites that use SIREN, a Notify Only employee attribute exists on the Employee Modify page.

When the Notify Only attribute is enabled for an employee, the employee is only considered available by ARCOS for Notifications and not for regular callouts.  Employees with the Notify Only attribute enabled cannot be overridden and called for regular callouts by an ARCOS user.

Note: Contacts flagged as Notify Only cannot call the inbound system. If a Notify Only contact tries to call the inbound system they will be told their ID or PIN are incorrect.

The Notification (No Response) callout type script does not require the contact to verify receipt of the message. However, if an employee calls inbound and they were called for a Notification (No Response) and the notification is still open, the employee will be able to listen to the notification message again.

Note: All Notification (No Response) call flows, for every customer, allow an acknowledgement of receipt when calling inbound to respond or when responding via mobile. An acknowledgement of receipt of the notification is considered an accept. When answering the notification via outbound, you cannot accept the call, as the notification plays the custom message twice then hangs up. Inbound and mobile follow the Notification call flow and allow the user to acknowledge the notification, accepting that they have heard the message.

Notifications do not create callout records and they are not counted in availability percentage, as they do not fill a position, they are simply a notification.

Employees in the standard crew callout ARCOS database are eligible for Notification callouts but these contacts do not incur charges or credits when confirming receipt of a Notification message.

Some companies use SIREN to communicate with their commercial customers and their marketing representatives during Peak Management Events (PME) to request activation or termination of peak shaving procedures. When using SIREN in this way, companies use specially designed callout types and callout reasons that refer to the process of calling contacts on a list and not necessarily contacts that are members of crews in the sense of regular callout functionality. There are no restrictions on how these rosters are set up to be called out, so ARCOS does not contain any logic to control the composition of lists to be called in this situation.

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*Note: Not all companies have all of the items described in the Online Help.