Incident Response

Setting Up a Hotline

An incident response team’s lifeblood is its communications; clients have to be able to alert the team to an emergency any time of the day or night, and from anywhere. Just like any customer service organization, the team must always be available. One of the most common methods of doing that is to set up a hotline. This is most often a physical phone line that is used for nothing other than calls to the team, but email, cellular, and/or pager systems almost always support it. Keep in mind that if the network or email servers are down or having problems, email notifications probably won’t work or be sent in a timely fashion, but you may be able to use alternate email accounts or dialup accounts if email is absolutely necessary.

The three most important communications media for most organizations are telephone, facsimile, and email. All of them should be available around the clock to customers the team supports. The bottom line is that a customer must never be in a situation in which the team is unreachable, for any reason. Of course, being available around the clock can be difficult, especially for a one- or two-person team. It might well take some innovative applications of technology and resources to accomplish that level of availability.

Depending on the size of your organization and team, the hotline you set up might be answered by dedicated hotline staff, another help desk facility, or even an automated voice mail menu system. In several cases, teams are ...