Zello Feature: Emergency Alerts

With Zello's Emergency Alerts, team members simply press a button to send an audio recording and their location with high priority to a designated emergency channel. This immediately shares the nature and location of an emergency to those that need to know. 

Emergency Alerts keep your workforce safe, informed, and connected with a push-to-talk app. This is especially powerful for organizations with employees who work alone, remote, or in the field. Through mass communication, geolocation sharing, and emergency channels, employees quickly respond to and resolve critical events.

How do Emergency Alerts work?

Team members in distress press the emergency button in the push-to-talk app, which is accessible from any talk screen. When the emergency button is pressed, Zello automatically:

• Records and sends a message to the emergency channel
• Sends the user’s location to the emergency channel
• Gives emergency messages priority over other messages until the crisis ends

Once the initiator of the emergency is no longer in distress, they can dismiss the emergency alert. Everything that occurs on the push-to-talk app during an emergency is recorded in the emergency channel, providing a valuable record of the events that transpired. 

Why use Emergency Alerts?

Push-to-talk capabilities are critical to workers who don’t sit at desks - those who work out in the field, spend time driving, or work on the manufacturing floor. These workers are sometimes in dangerous conditions and sometimes work alone. The responsibility falls on employers to keep their workers safe and provide them with a means to communicate in emergency situations. For example, California passed a law in 2018 that requires hotels to provide their workers with a panic button (Section 6403.7 of the Labor Code). Here are the top 5 reasons to use Emergency Alerts:

• Your members are dispersed, work in dangerous conditions, or work alone
• Your team members require an efficient method of notifying everyone about the nature and location of an emergency
• Your emergency communication tool needs to work in critical conditions, like if power lines fail and only low bandwidth data networks or WiFi are available
• You need a special group of people to instantly receive notifications when any one on your team has an emergency
• You want to give your team members peace of mind, no matter where they’re located

When to use Emergency Alerts

Emergency Alerts are useful in any event when team members are at risk, including:

• Natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods
• Fires
• Equipment malfunction or user error
• Injuries and other urgent medical situations
• Release of hazardous substances
• Threats of violence
• When drivers or truckers have accidents on the road
• When security guards need backup during an escalating incident
• When a taxi or limo driver has a rider that becomes drunk, aggressive, or takes off without paying

How to get Emergency Alerts

If you’re not already using Zello to communicate at work, try it for free by clicking the banner at the bottom of the page.

Once you’re a Zello user, enable Emergency Alerts by logging in to your management console as an administrator and following these steps:

• Go to Settings > Common > Emergency button
• Select channel for emergency notifications
• Select how long the emergency button must be pressed
• Click Save and Apply

Emergency Alerts are an add-on feature , per user. For more details, visit this support article.