When you are running a business, emergencies can strike anytime. As much as you want, you cannot prevent this from happening; at the best you can stay prepared for it. Thus, it is very important to have a proper emergency dispatch management at place. So, here is a guideline on what practices you should include in your emergency dispatch management.

In times of emergency your customers and clients can get really worried and maintaining a proper communication with them, giving them transparent idea about the situation is very important for sustenance and growth of your business. Thus, having a proper emergency dispatch service in place is one of the primary needs of a business. Whether you want to recruit an in house team or wish to engage a third party service provider depends on your budget and size of business; but there are some parameters you need to maintain in both the cases.

So, here are the best practices that you need to employ in your emergency dispatch management:

1. Prompt Reply: You are going through an emergency situation. Naturally, your customers and clients are worried; they want to know thousands of things. What is the present status of the business? When the company can get back to work? During this non-operational time what happen to the products and services they were supposed to receive? Lack of trust and agitation among your customers is natural. Any delay in communication will fuel the negative feelings even more. So here, prompt communication is one practice that should be maintained at all cost.
2. Professional Handling: Your customers, clients, investors or media; whoever is calling to get the update are desperate for information. So, you’ll definitely like to have specially trained work force who are accustomed in handling such situations. Now, if you are a small or medium business it is not always possible to invest that much in this category. Thus, it is best to employ a good call center service for this job. But make sure that the center maintains employee standard and all the people working have sound professional skills.
3. 24/7 Availability: This is one very important point and needs to be maintained at all cost. When people hear about the emergency, whatever kind it may be, they’ll want to call then and there. Make sure that there is someone around to handle the calls even at the oddest of the hours.
4. Proper Information: By nature, emergencies create confusion and a lot of speculation. While you cannot help it anyway, by dispatching proper information and maintaining transparency about the situation, you can put all of them to rest. It is of high importance that speculations are addressed with transparent information to maintain the credibility of the business in later years.
5. Co-ordination Among Officials: This one is vital. Your stakeholders are already confused about the situation. And if various officials give contradictory statements, that’ll only add up to their confusion. Thus, it is crucial to maintain co-ordination among your top officials at all point of time. Establish a mechanism well in advance to make sure that co-ordination is at its best.
6. One Point of Contact: Whatever the nature of emergency is, maintaining only one point of contact for all out going communication can reduce the confusion to minimum. Make sure during troubled time all the information is transmitted through the emergency dispatch service only, be it in house or a third party service centre.
7. Be Prepared for Everything: You are preparing for emergency and the nature of that cannot be fathomed beforehand, no matter how hard you try. It can be something of financial nature like a stock market break down, it can be something accidental like a fire in the premises or it can even be negative publicity propaganda. But whatever the situation is, make sure the team handling emergency dispatch is capable and prepared to handle any kind of emergency efficiently. A highly trained work force is the necessity here.
8. Empathy: Last but not the least; empathy should be practiced in all stages of emergency dispatch. People who are calling are worried, confused and eager for information, the person handling the calls should be able to put him/herself in their shoes and deal with utmost level of courtesy and professionalism.

So, these are the practices that can make your emergency dispatch team a lot more efficient than the others. The way you respond when in trouble, says a lot about your personality and it goes the same for businesses as well. So, create an emergency dispatch team to put forward a professional face during troubled times.