Intelligent Use of Alerts in Proactive Number Testing

Alerts are an essential tool for staying informed about issues in real-time. They allow you to take immediate action to resolve problems, ensure compliance, and maintain good customer service. They save you time and energy by automatically delivering notifications to you and eliminating the need to constantly check for potential problems manually. Alerts are cost-effective as they help to avoid costly downtime and lost revenue due to technical difficulties or other issues.

Want to find out more about how to get the most out of alerting when performing number testing? Then read on…

Proactive Testing + Powerful Alerting = Good Brand Reputation

You could have thousands of numbers that you test proactively. Proactive testing is great because it allows you to catch issues before your customers even notice them. The more often you test, the more chances you have to catch the problem and save your brand reputation. And let’s be honest – real-time alerting will make your proactive testing super effective!

Why? Because it saves you time…

You will generate a large amount of data from the tests, but of course, you are most interested in seeing the critical failures. However, you may find it challenging to keep track of the results and identify potential issues in a timely manner. You need to be sure that you are always informed of any issues or outages with your phone numbers in real-time. This helps you to take immediate action to resolve the problem and maintain good CX. This is key reason why it is essential that an alert system that sends notifications in real-time.

Make a Plan

So, after deciding to use alerting, it is vital to have a plan in place to ensure the seamless operations of your number test alerting.

Let’s use the example of the thousands of phone numbers you want to test again. These phone numbers may not all be of equal importance. You will want to test some of them more frequently and others less frequently.

Critical numbers will be your priority, and you will want to know if there’s something wrong with these as soon as the issue occurs. It’s very important to prioritize testing your phone numbers that are critical to the functioning of your business or are related to high-risk operations first; but the same goes for the alert type, methods, processes, delivery and flows, etc. used.

Best Practice when Setting the Alert Notifications for your Phone Number Testing

Here’s what you should do or at least consider doing to get the most from your alerting system:

1. Prioritize your numbers and the way you are alerted on them. 

Your critical numbers may need a specific alerting method. The same goes for the issue types. You’ll need to prioritize the alerts for the issues that are most critical for you, those that are moderately important, and those that are minor. Connection issues are always considered critical, and as such, you need to know as soon as these problems occur. This is because a connection issue mean your customer was unable to reach you.

2. Create a clear escalation strategy and resolution process for phone number testing alerts.

To manage phone number testing alerts effectively, establish a clear escalation strategy that identifies the responsible person or team and outlines when to escalate alerts.  For instance, a CRITICAL error like a phone number failing on connection, indicates your customers can’t connect to your business and must be immediately escalated to the correct team for quick action. Along with this, a clear resolution process should be in place that includes acknowledging receipt of alerts, escalating them appropriately, and taking the necessary actions to resolve the issues.

This approach ensures that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities, reduces confusion and uncertainty, and minimizes the impact of phone number issues on your business, providing confidence that they will be resolved swiftly and efficiently.

3. Make sure the alerts contain the relevant information that is needed for further investigation.

Without all necessary information to hand, your team may not be able to resolve issues quickly – they will need to undertake further research in order to try and troubleshoot the problem which will take time and affect your MTTR (mean-time to resolution). 

4. Choose the right notification method for phone number testing alerts.

When you’re dealing with alerts on phone numbers, you need to use a notification method that will grab the recipient’s attention quickly. You don’t want to send an email if the person only checks it twice a day, or call them if they’re just going to mute their incoming calls – alerts won’t be effective. To make sure your team takes action fast, you should send notifications in a way that works for them.

5. Ensure alert notifications can reach intended recipients.

It’s crucial to ensure that alert notifications are delivered to the intended recipient without any interference. This means taking steps to prevent spam filters or other barriers from blocking these notifications. If an important notification regarding one of your key phone numbers not being operational ends up in the wrong inbox or is missed, it may lead to an operational downtime.

Spearline’s alerting system is designed to fit your unique needs. We understand how crucial it is for you to be notified as soon as a problem arises, so you can take swift action and ensure your customers are satisfied. With our fully customizable alerts, you can receive notifications through your preferred channel: email, webhook, Slack, SNMP trap or even a phone call. If you’d like to learn more about Number Testing and how we can tailor our Alerting system to meet your specific needs, we would love to hear from you.