We understand that two way SMS can be prone to local carrier issues, where a SMS recipient may reply to an event, but that response may not reach xMatters and be recorded.
In a Emergency instance, an SMS recipient might reply "1 - I need urgent help" but an unreliable SMS may not return that reply to xMatters. In this case, the emergency response team would not be aware this employee's "need for urgent help". Further, the responder is not aware that their reply "seeking urgent help" was never received and recorded in xMatters. Both the Emergency Team and the employee are unaware of this failure in a critical communication.
We would like to see xMatters consider a feature that allows for optionally configuring and sending of an "Acknowledgement" message back to the responder when their reply is received. This is the only way let the responder know that their SMS reply was (or wasn't) received and recorded in xMatters. We would instruct our employees that if they did not get an SMS acknowledgement, then they need to respond through another channel if available.
We have seen similar functionality in other BCM / Emergency Comm systems, which makes perfect sense given the fact that SMS is unpredictable.
An added capability would be providing the recipient with additional instructions or details depending on their response. In the above example, the acknowledgment message back to the employee's "1 - I need urgent help" could be "Help is on the way, please shelter in place" etc. The use of an acknowledgement message could be applied to other devices and not just SMS.
It would be interesting to hear impressions from other customers, especially those using xMatters BCM.
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Hi Jens - thank you for the feedback.
One idea from a product manager (cheers Jan K) to solve your problem now is for you to use our Integration Builder platform. It allows you to take actions based on things happening in our system like an event ending, an escalation occurring, or a response coming in.
In the Integration Builder you can evaluate the user's chosen response, and the device it was sent from, and then trigger another message back to the user. That allows you to decide if you want to send a message back to all responses or select ones (it might best to only send them to users that need positive acknowledgement or follow-up instructions so you don't clutter up your system).
I'll see what I can do to get you some more detailed assistance.
Great option and appreciate the follow-up. This would be a short term solution we will look into, but ideally the Incident Manager would be able to enable and set an acknowledgement string at the plan/form/scenario level, which would be valuable to many and really slick.
Understood on the "short term solution vs packaged in the product."
And I haven't played it all the way through, but I think we could accommodate the behavior you describe in the short term solution. Add a new text property to the form, with a reasonable default value and attach it to the layout with the setting "Include in Outbound Integrations." That will allow the field to be available at send time with a value that can be overridden if desired. And it would be available to the Integration Builder for passing into the follow-up message.