Keeping patrons safe while at your property is a fundamental part of your job.
It’s your job to develop and facilitate a system that affords your guests protection from hazards that occur, or may potentially occur, at your property. How you organize your operation affects everyone in the long run.
How do you accomplish this? Start connecting and identifying with your patrons. After all, what matters most is your ability to provide your customers with a remarkable experience.
An incident management system (IMS) can influence your operation and the guest experience. We believe that your IMS is the backbone needed to achieve this.
Don’t have an incident management system, yet? Well then, it’s time to be in-the-know on how an IMS can create order amongst all the chaos at your property.
How an Incident Management System Creates Order
Incidents are unplanned and as such can cause disruption, chaos, confusion, etc. None of these describe an ideal scenario when handling guests. Certainly this isn’t great when you have lots of part time staff or suffer from high staff turnover.
An effective incident management system must focus on communication, automation, and flexibility.
Choosing a new system? Start fresh and use this list as guidance to ensure the system you choose provides you with all the following qualities.
- Instant communication. It is imperative that your IMS has the ability to enter details and the status of an incident via text or email. Look for a system that allows incident reporting and status to be communicated in many different ways from many different places.
- A web-based system gives you a digital paper trail. It is imperative to eliminate pen and paper in your documenting procedures. All of your communication, incident details and related documents can then be accessed at any time. This is key to mitigate your liability. Clear, concise, and complete reports are essential to liability defense.
- Automate the sending of alerts and notifications by incident types. When a specific incident is reported, a message is sent to the associated need-to-know members of your team.
- Eliminate inconsistency with how your staff handle incidents by having the ability to manage your protocols. Set up your protocols to display in your system, by incident type, so that your staff know exactly what to do when an incident occurs. This consistency is key to enhance your protocols moving forward and your liability defense as well.
- Permissions. Being able to segment information by permissions allow your staff to see what they need to see.
- Have a database of persons associated to previous incidents.Store and easily access information of persons previously involved in incidents. Whether you’re encountering an unruly or valued patron, you’ll be equipped with the right information to make an informed judgment call.
- You must be able to clearly analyze incidents. Your IMS system must have a robust reporting feature. This gives you the birds-eye perspective that you need when doing analysis. As importantly, eliminating hours of spreadsheet prep is as important to getting the analysis done. Sending reports to your boss with one click is a huge bonus!
- Ease of training your staff on the system. Having and using a system where your staff is trained to properly use it is the only way you can create and then maintain order. You’ll want a solution provider that helps you complete your implementation and provides your team with ongoing support and training. A system that isn’t used, just isn’t any good.
- Your team shouldn’t need to be tech savvy in order to set up and managing the system. It’s hard enough to find good employees; don’t create another hurdle to the hiring process. An intuitive system will allow you to remove your IT department from the implementation process.
- Scalable systems help you the most by adapting to your needs. A progressive IMS will allow you to grow your system for your needs.
Bonus: Peace of Mind
Creating order doesn’t stop at order itself. What truly matters is what you get from all the order: continuous analysis of your response times. All of this results in a positive experience for your patrons.
An IMS gives you analytics to help you respond to more incidents in less time, making all the difference. Using your analytics to measure your team’s performance over and over again will have positive long-term effects.
Push your team to deliver an exceptional experience for your patrons…and what you’ll get from all of this is an added bonus you’ve earned – peace of mind.
