Everbridge Mass Notification Reviews

We're a law firm with 200 employees; 90% of the firm is based in New York, and we have seven other offices, five of which are out of the country. 

We initially started using the solution for business continuity purposes, but since the pandemic, we switched to using it for IS outages. When we had hurricane Sandy, we used the platform to send blast notifications to everybody in the organization, informing them the firm would be closed. Now we use it more for IS purposes; we use Microsoft Outlook, and if there is an outage, we can fall back on Everbridge to send a message that our systems are down and report back as soon as they are up again.   

We can now contact our staff outside our network, which is essential when we have system or network outages. Everbridge is the only way we can send a message to everyone, primarily via text to their cell phones. 

The solution helps contribute to our organization's business goals and mission because we operate 24/7 and always look out for our employees. 

The platform has increased our productivity since we started using it for IS outages; if we experience an issue with Outlook, we can still contact all our staff by phone. That alone saved a couple of hundred phone calls to our help desk from employees reporting problems on Outlook. 

The ability to text all our staff and categorize by specific fields, such as department or position, are valuable features. We can gear messages to specific people or target a particular office, such as the New York office or Washington DC office only. We can target specific departments, such as corporate or litigation, which is very useful for us. Once, we had an active shooter near our Washington, DC, office, and we could send out a message to all the staff in that office. On another occasion, there was a Long Island railroad strike so we could contact all our staff who lived there. 

Everbridge can send out conference bridge meetings, but as nobody uses conference calls anymore, we would love to be able to generate Zoom links through the solution. That would be extremely helpful.

We've been using Everbridge Mass Notification for around six years. 

The solution is very stable. 

Regarding scalability, it's precisely what we need, and I rate the solution 10 out of 10 here.

We reached out to our account rep a few times, but we never had a problem we had to escalate to customer support. The support we have received, however, is excellent. 

Positive

The pain point we experienced before using Everbridge was that our previous mass notification system was slower and more challenging. In a high-stress situation, we need to be able to get messages out to our staff quickly and efficiently. 

Before Everbridge, we used a system called Send Word Now, but it's a more clunky application; there are around four different navigation pages to send one message. Everbridge makes the process straightforward because we can configure a message on one page and send it quickly. This gives us confidence because we know that we can act relatively quickly in an emergency, even if we are very stressed. 

Before we used Send Word Now, we relied on email. We used Send Word Now for several years, and our position required us to assess the market periodically. The Everbridge name came up in a business community tabletop exercise, and other businesses and government agencies were starting to use it. This piqued our interest, and we contacted a salesperson to investigate further.

I can't speak to the complexity of the deployment as I'm not in the IT department, and I was minimally involved.

Regarding maintenance, I maintain the daily feed which comes into Everbridge. Sometimes we get error messages because the feed has incorrect information, which is helpful as they allow me to fix the mistakes. For example, suppose an employee puts their phone number into the internal firm directory but forgets to include the area code. In that case, I'll get an Everbridge error message informing me.

We see an ROI, though the solution doesn't generate capital or involve production. It's available 24/7, and we can use it whenever necessary. Our foreign offices, including our Hong Kong office, also use the product, which is helpful.

We recently renewed our contract, and the pricing is on the higher end. We have a yearly license with a three-year commitment, which seems standard, so we have no issues with that.

We evaluated all the big names in the marketplace. 

I rate the solution 10 out of 10. 

We use the solution when we want to get a message out to all of our staff or throughout the state. We use it to notify them of service unavailability and other issues, including emergencies such as power outages. When we have inclement weather, we use the solution to inform staff if they don't have to come into the office or if they need to take any precautions.  

We also use Urgent Desktop alerting by Everbridge; it's similar to Mass Notification and allows us to send alerts to company desktops.   

The most significant benefit of using the solution is leveraging multiple ways to contact our staff; we can get to them by email, text, and phone to ensure the message gets through. Then there's the feedback loop to inform us that they successfully received the message. We noticed the benefits of using the product immediately.   

Regarding Everbridge contributing to our business goals and mission, it enhances our communication, helps us keep our staff informed, and serves as a tool for our continuity of operations plans.  

The product dramatically increased our organization's mass notification capabilities, especially in our ability to verifiably contact.  

The platform has improved our productivity by making it easier to communicate through multiple methods and streamlining and providing accurate notifications around events.   

The most valuable features are the ease of use and the ability to set up templates for similar events, which helps streamline and makes it faster to get the message out, especially during a crisis.

Regarding improvement, it could be clearer around selecting groups of users to notify; it could be more intuitive to pick who we want to send messages to.

In terms of pain points, it was more difficult to reach out to staff in the way that is most effective for them.

We have been using the solution for five years. 

The platform is stable. 

The solution is scalable. We don't have plans to increase our usage, as we are already using it to the fullest extent. 

Everbridge Mass Notification is the first solution of this type we've used; we previously relied on email etc.

The initial deployment was straightforward and took about a month. A team of five was responsible for the implementation, and it doesn't require any maintenance on our end. 

We have the solution deployed state-wide and have approximately 500 total users.  

The ROI is not quantifiable, but the solution provides the service we pay for and does it effectively. 

The product is fairly priced. 

I rate the solution nine out of ten; there's always room for improvement.

The main pain point we experienced before using the solution was the difficulty in reaching out to staff in the way that was most effective for them. It was more challenging to get messages out and made us less effective overall. 

Using multiple products from the same vendor helps with potential integration and ease of use.  

Having multiple Everbridge products affects the learning curve when implementing subsequent solutions, but we don't have any data on time saved because the integration is very new. The products are well integrated.

Using Mass Notification and Urgent Desktop creates efficiencies. 

I recommend Mass Notification; it's a great product, the implementation is easy, and it's effective.  

We use Everbridge Mass Notification for sending out robocalls to our residents. In the broadest sense, if we have a message to go out to all residents, we just send a blanket message. We have about 27,000 individuals in the system. They are either who have signed up to use it or are pulled from white pages and yellow pages. 

We have mass notifications, such as COVID notifications, that go out to everyone. When we were setting up testing or inoculation centers, we would send messages to let everybody know what was available. In addition, we do targeted messages so that if there are street closures for repairs or an event, we can target a particular section of town and send a message out to residents in just that area.

It provides the ability to push out messages. We have a website, and we have social media, but they, of course, are targeted. If somebody is not looking at the website, they're not going to see it. You have to actively seek out the website to find that. Social media people have to be on social media, and they have to be on at the time you're sending messages out. For a robocall, you choose your time and send it out, and you get a ready-made audience.

It hasn't helped us save time, but it gave us another avenue to get the communications out. It has improved our ability to communicate.

Most recently, the ability to pull from white pages and yellow pages is valuable. It used to be that we were using the system and people had to sign up to be included in it, and just last year, we were given the option to pull from white pages and yellow pages, which broadens our audience considerably.

There are certain aspects of the system that don't work exactly as I would like them to. I've been working with them literally for years to get certain things resolved, and there are always issues and problems. One of the issues that we've been dealing with recently and for some time now is that some people don't get the message. It goes out to 27,000 people, and afterward, I hear from people that they did not get the message, or their phone didn't ring, and it didn't go to voicemail. Nothing happened, and they were just dropped. This seems to be an ongoing issue.

In conjunction with that, there is an ability for me to download a spreadsheet that lists what happened with the outgoing call. It lists everybody included in the call and what they should have received. In other words, if they hung up, if it went to the voicemail, or if they picked up and answered, all that is in the database/spreadsheet. That doesn't seem to correspond to reality in all cases. Sometimes, it says that people got the call, but they didn't.

Another issue is that when the call comes in, it sometimes gets truncated, so the beginning of the message is missing from the call. These are all glitches that we've been working on with them, and they're still ongoing. If you let it go to voicemail, it records your message, but sometimes, it truncates the beginning. What happens is that in the end, it says, "To repeat this message, press two", and then it says that three times. If you do not press two, it repeats the message anyway, so that winds up with a long voicemail message on people's machines or voicemails.

I've been with the town for about six years, and very soon after I started with the town, I took it on. It was with the town prior to my coming there, so I don't know how long they've been using it.

Its stability is fine. There are no problems.

We send out messages, and certain people don't receive them. They get it one day and then the next day, we send the same message, and they don't get it. According to Everbridge, there is a possibility that this is because of the number of people involved, and they are looking into this. 

I've contacted their tech support. They're relatively easy to get hold of. I've reached out to them at night, and I've reached out to them from outside the country. I never had a problem getting through to somebody. Their frontline people are very helpful in using the system. For example, if the mapping changed and I had a question about that, I could call and get help over the phone, and they seem to be knowledgeable about that and very helpful. The downside is connecting with the actual tech people. When there's a problem where the frontline people need to get tech people involved, there's an extra step, and that's more complicated. I'd rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

When I came on board, it was already in use. I wasn't here before that, so I don't know the pain points or challenges we experienced prior to using Everbridge Mass Notification.

We haven't used any other solutions by Everbridge. We are only using Everbridge Mass Notification. For the most part, it's just robocalls, but we occasionally also send out text messages using Everbridge Mass Notification.

I was not involved in its deployment. The maintenance involved would be when they implement changes. In some cases, we had to almost relearn the system. There was a change about a year ago that impacted the mapping, and it worked entirely different than previously. We had to basically relearn how to do this.

Their mass notification capabilities change all the time. We get emails on practically a daily basis, and sometimes, many emails in the course of the day about changes and upgrades to their system, many of which do not impact us. For the ones that do not impact us, we get a message saying that they've changed their systems in Singapore. They're doing a lot of changes on an ongoing basis, and some of them do impact us.

It's not an investment that has been made for financial purposes. It's an investment that has been made to get the message out to people and certainly, the messages do get out. In that sense, we have seen an ROI.

It's fairly easy to learn and use. It has a lot of details, so you do need to pay attention to what you're doing. I'd advise asking a lot of questions because there are capabilities that are buried, and there have been times when we've only found out that something is available by asking about it.

I'd rate Everbridge Mass Notification a seven out of ten.

Anytime there is a major event—outages, weather situations, or things of that nature—we use the solution.

More people are in the know, especially when we have dangerous situations going on. Hospital-wide, people know about them. We have different facilities and this is a good communication tool to get information out. It gets to more people at one time, quickly, than any other platform.

If the health system I work for did not utilize this, it would risk not getting critical alerts out to the right people ASAP. And then, people wouldn't know if they're walking into a dangerous situation or if there are downtime procedures that they might need to utilize.

It has affected productivity in a good way and has saved us time. We typically have certain distribution lists, via email, and those notifications are not going to reach everyone at the same time. Instead of having to email certain groups of people, taking the time to type things up, you can just send an automated message out, either to certain groups or hospital-wide. Having to send messages out manually by email takes time and energy. It's easier to send out mass communication to everyone that a message needs to go to.

It can be utilized in different ways. There are different numbers that users can be called at. They can be sent messages. They can be sent calls to whichever number they have listed. It is a better way to get those communications out to people.

It will call and leave me a message, letting me know what's going on. I like the fact that it leaves automated messages about whatever the problem or alert situation is. It lets you know. That capability is valuable because people now tend to keep their phones with them, more so than anything else. They're more prone to listen to or see an alert coming through their telephone rather than via email.

If the user could personalize their dashboard a little bit more, that would be helpful.

Also, we were using Everbridge HIPAABridge, but we recently did away with that. Some things did not get to people in a timely manner. It was supposed to be just like text messaging, but sometimes providers received things late or not right away.

Because we were pleased with Everbridge Mass Notification, we went with HIPAABridge, which was the secure chat. But when they made changes to that platform, our health system wasn't pleased with it because there were a lot of things missing. HIPAA Bridge was good. It wasn't perfect, but it did what it needed to do. When they sunset that particular product or they rebranded it, they got rid of HIPAABridge and changed it to just Everbridge. And when that happened, the look changed and some of the functionality changed as well. Some things were taken away instead of things being added. 

Along with that change came glitchiness and delays, and it was not user-friendly. That is what made us get rid of it. And now, we use a different vendor for secure messaging and that product is easier to use.

I have been using Everbridge for over six years, as long as I've been in the health system.

I haven't personally had any problems with the technical support.

Positive

I can't speak about ROI in monetary terms, but when an alert goes out saying that "XYZ" is going to happen today, or is about to happen, or is happening, it gets people ready to do what they need to do. They'll know what their workflow is going to be, and in some cases, ahead of time. That way, they aren't just thrown into something. The staff or the health system will be aware that something is going on so that they can prepare for it.

It's gotten the job done and that's why we've kept it. It just does what it needs to do as far as alerting people goes. Especially in our department, if we have major or critical downtimes, Everbridge is how our health system is alerted. There are people who rarely check their emails and this is the tool that gets the job done when it comes to communication.

Multiple Solutions - One Vendor

It's preferable to use multiple products from the same vendor because there are cost savings involved when you do that. It's better to have one line for support instead of having to reach out to three different vendors. It's ideal to utilize one vendor for everything, if the solutions work. 

Using multiple features from Everbridge helped our organization with cost savings, at the time. It also created efficiencies at the time because we could go to the administrative dashboard if someone had an issue with passwords or needed a reset. There was just one dashboard and we could choose what we needed to do or where we wanted to go.

We are currently using Everbridge as our mass communication software for events considered emergencies or crises. I am responsible for mass notifications. We do use IT alerting as well, but I am responsible for the mass communications piece of emergency response.  

We use this software in the event of a crisis or an emergency, either weather-related or safety-related, and we use it globally. The emergencies and crises can be anything from a landslide to an earthquake to an active shooter to chemical spills and so on.  

For my particular role, the incident management piece is the most valuable. This is where we can set predefined templates with predefined contacts attached to those templates so that an operator can just pull up the template and send a message out to a contact list straight away.  

One place where Everbridge can be improved is its language libraries. It is weak on languages. Because we are trying to deploy it globally, it affects our usage across languages. They have some weaknesses in that area and it is really noticeable when trying to scale globally.  

We have been using this product within our organization for about 10 years.  

I would say the stability of the product is very good.  

We currently have over 150,000 contacts in the product database. As far as users, we have trained users who are actually the operators who are sending out the messages. I would say we have between 200 to 300 operators globally.  

I am not always pleased with the service level where we are receiving from the Everbridge technical support team. On a scale of one to ten, I would give them only a six or seven-out-of-ten. The technical support can definitely be improved and could be more consistent.  

I have been doing some ongoing exploratory research to find out what other software is on the market that has similar capabilities. I am looking at other products on the market that may be competing to see how they compare and to gauge user opinions.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this solution as an eight or nine-out-of-ten. I say that after reviewing some of the other products on the market. I have not been able to find anything that is decidedly better.  

The advice that I would give to others looking into implementing this product is that I would definitely recommend it for many organizations that do not need a global solution. If they do not need multiple language capabilities, it is something that can be deployed very quickly and it is a very good product. It needs some language tweaking. A good example of the limitations would be that online training is not available in multiple languages.  

Additional features that I would like to see in the next release of the Everbridge Mass Notification is really, mostly, additional language support. Also, there is one piece within the software that is called Scenarios which could be more fine-tuned. It currently needs some work to improve that functionality.  

Our primary use is for fire and EMS alerts to a group of rural subdivisions organized under the Firewise USA program and served by the Mendocino County Office of Emergency Services. Currently, Everbridge is used for emergency notifications and Nixle is being evaluated for close to real-time alerts and information updates.

It has been used successfully for large scale notifications as well as defined geographic area targeted notifications. The use of Nixle SMS service for incident notification and ongoing information is being discussed.

SAME and polygonal geographic targeting allow for localized mass notification which reduces communication volume.

Online training materials and support documentation could be improved.

An additional feature that should be included in the next release would be a contact database upload/download/sync.