Many organizations require there always be at least one staff member on call who is able to respond to client questions or emergency situations should they come up after business hours. The issue is knowing who is on call at a particular moment and how to contact them.
SimplyCast aims to help streamline this process with the development of a new schedule management tool, OnCall, that is available within the EmergHub suite of applications. OnCall provides organizations and businesses with a simple way to manage on call shifts for employees and help ensure they can be easily reached whenever they need to be.
With OnCall, administrators are able to create groups of on call staff and add a set of shifts that each specific group will be responsible for. Assign these shifts to members of the group and manage these shifts on the calendar interface within the application. Each group is designated one phone number that, when called, will automatically transfer the caller to the phone number of the current on call personnel, which solves the issue of not knowing who to contact during a particular OnCall shift.
Staffing thresholds can also be applied to shifts to ensure you always have the proper level of coverage during the days and times with the highest levels of potential traffic. Set your minimum required number of on call group members required per shift, as well as the ideal number of personnel you would prefer to have available to respond should the need arise.
Colored cues are visible on the calendar interface to help in determining whether the staffing threshold has been met. The date will appear yellow if the ideal threshold has not been met but the minimum number of on call representatives have been scheduled for the shift. If the date appears red, this means the shift has not been properly covered, with not even the minimum threshold being met. These cues help administrators to know with plenty of time whether they need to schedule more group members for a particular shift in order to meet at least the minimum threshold requirements.
Another issue that some organizations have in regard to their on call staff is that sometimes the designated on call personnel aren't aware of exactly when their on call shifts begin. The OnCall tool gives you the ability to send reminders to group members a certain time before their shift is due to start via email, phone, and/or SMS. Another reminder can also be set up to send whenever the shifts are scheduled to wrap up.
OnCall is a robust scheduling tool that allows you to create a streamlined calendar containing the shifts of all your on call personnel's shift schedules; add, remove, or override shifts depending on the fluctuating need; as well as export the shift schedule of a particular group member. If you would like to learn more about SimplyCast's OnCall feature, check out this page or contact sales@simplycast.com.
