Frequently Asked Questions
itrezzo UCM is an enterprise software platform which provides businesses productivity and product gains by automatically syncing shared contacts, calendars, CRM contacts and more to smartphones. Learn more about the solution here.
What is the itrezzo Unified Contact Manager Solution?
The itrezzo Unified Contact Management (UCM) platform is an on-premise solution with the goal of enhancing and protecting organizations’ ability to communicate with employees internally and externally in any situation. This is accomplished by unifying contact information sources and distributing contact and calendar data to company smartphones on a regular basis through a streamlined admin console.
We have an internally-developed system which updates employee Outlook contacts. Why would we need itrezzo Unified Contact Manager?
- We don’t create duplicates. Instead, we look for existing contacts that have the same email address and add to those records as needed
- We don’t overwrite existing contacts; itrezzo merges data.
- Rather than wiping a folder and recreating it like other solutions, itrezzo makes intelligent incremental updates to a folder. This reduces overall network traffic and ensures that every employee receives up-to-date information on their smartphones as soon as possible.
Why would we want two separate systems to reach employees?
Notification and contact optimization are two entirely distinct, but highly complementary capabilities. Many companies and government agencies use itrezzo Unified Contact Manager to provide accurate, up-to-date employee contact data to complement their notification system.
Every employee has a list of important phone numbers and contact persons for use in an emergency. Does itrezzo Unified Contact Manager provide some additional value for crisis situations?
The itrezzo Unified Contact Manager shines in these challenging scenarios. We keep the up-to-date directory where it’s really needed: in Outlook and on the handheld wireless devices of your choice.
Does itrezzo Unified Contact Manager provide incident management?
We do not provide incidient management.
How does itrezzo handle the problem of accuracy degrading with time?
Over time, most employee contact databases become less accurate. The larger the organization, the worse this problem tends to be. This is solved with the optional Self-Service Update platform of itrezzo Unified Contact Manager. The itrezzo Self-Service Update automatically collects information from new employees and ask existing employees to confirm the accuracy of their details. This steadily improves contact database accuracy and ensures employees are more reachable.
We have very accurate information on each employee, and can reach them. But how do we best deliver this data to our employees, so they can easily reach their co-workers?
You need to push the information to the internal address book on the cellphones that your employees carry and this information should be updated, at least on a daily basis. Every time someone updates a piece of data, itrezzo Unified Contact Manager makes sure it is delivered frequently, without requiring any employee action. With most internally-built employee data systems, each employee must repeatedly update their own smart phone directory. Usually, they don’t perform this update frequently enough.
With itrezzo Unified Contact Manager, they never have to download the directory to their smart phone, but they remain up to date at all times.
What if we simply issued a Human Resources directive: every employee must update their directory and emergency contact information?
HR policies rarely achieve full compliance for updating. How do you know that Users have complied? If 80% of users did not make a change to their contact details, how do you know if it the low response means they were too busy or that the data was actually up to date?
itrezzo helps to ensure the employee directory is accurate and up-to-date by tracking who has reviewed their own contact profile and when it was last updated. Furthermore, the Self-Service Update reduces extraneous labor by having the employee update their own information.
When we issue a new smart phone, then sync it to Outlook, are we assured all the latest contact data is there?
Contact data in Outlook is not updated unless a user does it themselves. This usually happens so infrequently that the data is not reliable. The itrezzo Unified Contact Manager handles the process of updating employee-registered smart phone address books, delivering updates to the records and fields that an administrator designates for the user or class of user.
We’re very thorough at updating our employee list, and emailing it as a spreadsheet file to all employees weekly. Why would our organization need itrezzo?
The spreadsheet file is not a secure method—it can easily fall into the wrong hands.
Employee privacy needs to be protected to a reasonable degree.
Another drawback is that many employees will not print out the spreadsheet each week—if they did, it would waste a great deal of paper and time. Even if they did print it out, the likelihood of having a spreadsheet on-hand at all times is very low. In a true emergency, they will not find the printed spreadsheet and go flipping through it to look up phone numbers. It is much more efficient to have the address file up to date in their smart phone. itrezzo pushes the updated contact data on employees out to all smartphones.
How long does it take to implement a trial of itrezzo Unified Contact Manager?
Between one to three hours.
In a trial of itrezzo Unified Contact Manager, is any data entry required?
No. The itrezzo application can extract rich contact data from the GAL, Shared Mailboxes, Public Folders, and Salesforce.
Our IT department has invested a lot of time into building an internal contact system. Why do we need itrezzo Unified Contact Manager?
What many organizations discover about internal systems is that they tend to do one or two things well and are simply not designed to do everything well. It’s difficult for most IT departments to invest the time into unifying different contact database accurately and pushing this information to smartphones.
What happens when the original developer of the internal system leaves the company? Contact management chaos.
The itrezzo Unified Contact Manager supports IT departments and their companies internal contact system by automating contact management which reduces overall IT labor.
If we already have a mass notification system, why would our organization be interested in the itrezzo Unified Contact Manager?
Automated notification is a valuable capability, and unified contact management is often the missing ingredient for successful mass notification. There are excellent third-party and internally built notification systems, but they are only effective when they have up-to-date, accurate contact data on all your employees. The itrezzo Unified Contact Manager and the Self-Service Update supply that accurate and current data that your mass notification system needs.
For emergency or disaster situations, do we need anything besides our mass notification system?
Notification or broadcast is important, but it’s only half of the solution. Person-to-person communication in crisis is also essential; your employees need to talk to each other. That is a crucial aspect of handling a disaster or network outage.
It’s also important to remember that mass notification/broadcast systems can only reach your employees if their contact data is accurate. In many organizations, it’s not unusual to find errors in thirty percent of employee contact records. Email and phone data often have five percent error rates. In an urgent broadcast to employees, reaching only 95 percent leaves five percent at risk of not receiving the message.
itrezzo closes this 5% gap by making the employee directory available on employee smartphones even when the network is down.
I’m in COOP/ Disaster Recovery / Risk Management. In a crisis, there are people at other agencies or organizations I have to get in touch with, and vice versa. Can itrezzo UCM help?
Emergency response staff often need to cooperate closely, and connect reliably, to people at other organizations. The itrezzo Unified Contact Manager facilitates that through our InterOrg Connector module. This add-on that updates contact data between individuals of different organizations for constant inter-company or inter-agency reachability.
In an emergency, there are some key documents—our emergency plans for each group or department – that we want every employee to have. Can itrezzo Unified Contact Manager help with that?
Yes, our software platform can automatically push selected documents to selected groups of employees and store them in the smartphone cache memory.
Our internal employee data system updates automatically every pay period, from our payroll system—isn’t that sufficiently accurate?
It’s not sufficiently accurate. Payroll and most other internal systems do not always have the most current employee data, because it’s not needed for payroll. They have no intrinsic reason to update the employee contact data fields in the Global Address List (GAL) that change most frequently: their cellphone, office phone, and home phone numbers. It probably fails to include wireless handheld numbers and internal IDs of smart phones.
If your system updates from a payroll database, it will probably get one important field correct: it will remove contacts for employees who have terminated and add new employees.
What is the productivity gain with Self-Service Update?
The Self-Service Update reduces each employee’s workload on contact data entry from several hours in a year to about 15 minutes per year and all employees will always have the most accurate possible information on all employees whose contact data they are authorized to receive.
If itrezzo gives everyone the full corporate directory, does that mean everyone can see the CEO’s home number?
Definitely not. First, you can set itrezzo Unified Contact Manager so it provides only the right emergency contact information to the people that need it.
How expensive and difficult is it to run a trial of itrezzo Unified Contact Manager? Is there any data entry involved?
To learn more about and to set up the itrezzo, please contact the itrezzo support team.
For a test run, or actual implementation, what must be installed on our employees’ handheld devices?
Nothing is installed, except by your IT administrator on the server side. This is a zero-client, zero-training solution. Your employees will not be aware of our system, but they will notice that their contact list is already complete, up to date, and ready to use in their smart phone.
