[asterisk-biz] VoIP 9-1-1 failure - don't let it happen to you

[Drew Gibson]

SIP wrote:
> mroberts1818 at gmail.com wrote:
>   
>> Same here. 
>>
>> Being this is a business list - how would other sales/business/marketing minded people promote their 911 service?  Would you incorporate a real life scenario?  Yes? How would you address the tact aspect?
>>
>> Your thoughts,
>>
>>   
>>     
> My personal thoughts are this:
>
> 1) Using the death of a child in marketing of ANY kind is an emotional 
> appeal. With emotional appeals, you get emotional responses. That's just 
> the way marketing goes. They may be positive emotional responses (people 
> linking their compassion to a desire to 'never let it happen again' sort 
> of feeling), or they may be negative emotional responses (id est, "How 
> could you exploit the death of a child for your financial gain!"). 
> Either way, you have to be prepared for that sort of response, and 
> market accordingly.
>
> There's a great book called The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: 
> Mastering the Art and Discipline of the Business Narrative (Stephen 
> Denning) where he discusses the most common reactions to stories of a 
> particular theme. In this case, a negative story is often associated 
> with teaching a lesson. It is NOT, however, the best approach for 
> motivating a person or company to actually proactively change or gear up 
> toward a new strategy. For that, you need to present a different KIND of 
> supporting story.
>
> When looking for a positive emotional response, you need to give a 
> positive emotional stimulus.
>
> 2) Build trust.  You can't just simply drop into a mailing list and say, 
> "Don't let tragedy happen to you. Trust me to help you avert it."   Who 
> are you? Why should I trust you with the averting this tragedy?  Again, 
> back to the business narrative, it helps to be able to give a situation 
> in which trust in you was well-placed. Even if it's something as simple 
> as a customer testimonial or example in which you were able to help 
> someone with your services. If you don't have this, you had better start 
> getting that information, because people are going to want it. Metrics 
> and statistics help, but they only go so far toward assuaging the 
> misgivings people may have.
>
> Above all, speak the truth. When you're giving your examples or relating 
> your stories, they must be true. Artificial customer testimonials do not 
> build trust. If your customers are truly so thankful for your services, 
> they will often consent to being a reference and will allow others to 
> contact them as such.
>
> 3) Don't grab your supporting data fresh from the headlines before all 
> the truth and details come out. In this story, for instance, there's no 
> mention given as to WHY the 911 call went to the wrong city. In the US, 
> that ends up usually being inconvenient, but the E911 call centers are 
> generally pretty good at transferring you to a call center close by. Did 
> this not happen? Why not? What would have caused the ambulance to take 
> so long? Was it actually being DISPATCHED from a city too far away?  
> That's a breakdown of the 911 system, not of VoIP.
>
> Clearly the call went through from VoIP to a 911 call center, so the 
> provider WAS giving 911 services. It just went to the wrong call center. 
> Why? Was this the VoIP provider's fault? The customer for not updating 
> location information? The 911 provider's fault for not routing properly?
>
> None of these questions are answered, so we're left with more questions. 
> It's not a simple, clear-cut case of a VoIP provider not having 911 
> services. It's a case of a provider having 911 services, but they didn't 
> work properly. THIS is the most important aspect of this, because it 
> creates a scenario in which one distrusts the VoIP 911 provider almost 
> immediately out of the gate. How can one expect to sell services when 
> one is fostering an automatic distrust in them at the start of the 
> marketing appeal?
>
>
>   

Thanks for articulating the problems so well.

Paragraph 3 explains the difficulty I had with the OP.
Since I do not believe, as the headline implies, that VoIP is killing 
our children,  I made an effort (PRIOR to posting!) to find out what had 
really happened. I read the article:-

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080501.wphone02/BNStory/National/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20080501.wphone02%3E%20&id=RTGAM.20080501.wphone02

The few who read beyond the first few paragraphs may have found that the 
main problem was that the billing address had been updated after the 
customer moved but not the 911 address. The provider thought the 
customer should have updated this. The customer was surprised that the 
provider hadn't made the update.

A later story:-

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080504.wphone05/BNStory/National

confirms this.

We have a clash between the POTS model where the address for the phone 
number is inseparable from the 911 address (and your bellco took care of 
the details) and the VoIP model where there is little or no physical 
connection between the two and there is now some responsibility on the 
part of the customer to keep this up to date.

How do the current 911 service offerings address this?

regards,

Drew

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