On Sun, 5 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote:
There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest
technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and
large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or
call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their
call
center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those
that
call in.
It's a High School. They don't have a "support desk" (or more than handful of
phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per
school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad
weather.
If your resources are that tight, do what our local school district
did, mandate that all bus schedules will only be available on the web
site.
And then make sure something gets posted to the website.
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it
can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for
better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event.
Roland, sounds like you should have a few "public service"
announcements saying that school closures will be delivered via a
certain twitter username. Also send a flyer home with the students.
The radio station can pick up the twitter feed like everyone else, and
announce closures. That is the way a certain group of people are doing
it in the middle east right now, word gets around and word gets
out... In your case, the community will know quickly, all from a
couple of people logging into twitter and sending a few messages.
Sounds like a simple, ideal solution given your budget constraints.
--
steve
