Fortune 500 Aerospace Engineering Company Powers Voice Channel for Internal Employee App with Plum Survey

Personnel management can be difficult and the more employees a company has the harder it becomes to keep track of them. A Fortune 500 aerospace engineering company (AEC) has tens of thousands of employees all over the country. When disaster strikes, the company operates an employee accountability application that allows employees to check in and report whether they are affected by the current conditions and if so, how severely.

AEC uses a multi-channel solution that allows employees to verify their safety over email, SMS, or voice. “We want to make sure we have multiple ways for employees to report their status,” noted AEC’s emergency preparedness program manager.

When an incident occurs, the employee accountability app signals to employees in the affected area to check in. For the voice channel, AEC uses a Plum Voice survey application. To check in with the voice channel, employees call an 800-number and select the option for the employee accountability app. The call then gets transferred to Plum’s survey platform. Employees identify themselves with their employee number and then answer three questions.

1. Are you evacuated from your home?
2. Are you and your family okay?
3. Is your home habitable?

This information gets passed back to AEC’s employee accountability app in real time. This allows the company to see each employees’ status and the data feeds into their metrics and reporting.

As far as internal applications go, the voice survey is a tactical one for AEC. It doesn’t go to all employees every time a signal goes out. These alerts are geographically specific and only affect the employees in that area. In these situations, some employees don’t have internet or power, and they have limited mobile battery life. Therefore, it’s nice to have the capability of the 800-number where employees can use a landline without using up other resources.

The voice-based check in process differs from the email and SMS channels because the latter options only ask the evacuation question. “The hotline allows and provides much more detail than SMS or email. It gives us greater granularity as far as the data an employee can provide on their status.”

AEC’s survey app also functions as a backup for their other channels. When AEC had some issues with their SMS system, the company checked to make sure that the 800-number had the capacity to handle all impacted employees. In fact, Plum’s platform has the capacity to handle calls from all AEC’s 180,000 employees at the same time.

AEC’s emergency preparedness team subsequently notified all employees that if other channels don’t function properly, they should use the voice channel. Plum’s platform guarantees 100% uptime, so it provides the reliability that AEC needs.

The 800-number survey app functions as an active communications option and a proactive safety valve for AEC’s employee accountability system.