Effortless Incident Management Solutions: What to Look For

Are you struggling to record and process incidents within your organization? From customer service issues and compliance, to security breaches and network, poorly managed incidents can have a devastating impact on your business operations.

The manual process of recording, tracking, and resolving incidents can be time-consuming and ineffective, leading to increased costs and disorganization that reduces business efficiency.

The solution? Investing in good incident management software. With the right software, you can improve your response time, mitigate costs, and speed up processes across a wide range of incidents.

So what should you look for in an incident management solution to ensure your organization is equipped to handle whatever comes next? And before we get to that, why are advanced incident management solutions becoming so much more popular in recent years?

Why more organizations are upgrading to new incident management solutions

Without a proper incident management solution, it can be difficult to identify trends and make data-driven decisions, leading to repeated mistakes and minimal improvement. These issues can have a ripple effect on your organization's reputation, bottom-line, and the safety of your employees and clients.

From patient complaints in a hospital going unaddressed, to recurring equipment failures or safety hazards on a factory floor, poor incident management can lead to inefficiencies, delays, and even expensive legal issues.

As enterprise incident management solutions become much more affordable for small and mid-sized organizations, more of these companies are turning to software platforms like 3Di Engage to take the hassle out of incident management.

Let’s explore the essential features to look for in incident management software, and how it can help your organization efficiently and effectively handle incidents.

What to look for in an incident management solution

When an incident occurs, whether it's a major safety issue or a minor customer request, it's important to resolve it as quickly as possible and gain insights that can help reduce the number and severity of future incidents.

While this may seem challenging, it can be made simpler with the use of the right incident management solution, with software tailored to meet the specific needs of your organization.

Advanced Intake Forms

Imagine a situation where a patient is trying to report a complaint to a hospital, but the process is so confusing and difficult that they give up and decide not to come back.

Or a situation where a customer of a manufacturer is trying to report an issue with a product, but the process is so frustrating that they decide to take their business elsewhere.

In either case, the organization can’t respond to feedback, and doesn’t know why it’s losing business. Worse still, the problems don’t stop there: 

1. Incomplete information: Without an easy-to-use intake form, customers may struggle to provide all the necessary information, leading to incomplete reports and a lack of important details that can impede the incident resolution process.
2. Long response times: Without a streamlined process for incident reporting, staff may spend a significant amount of time trying to gather information, leading to delays in response times and a lack of customer satisfaction.
3. Difficulty in identifying trends: Without a standardized intake form, it can be difficult to identify patterns and trends in incidents, making it challenging to make data-driven decisions and improve processes.

With the ability to create and manage customized intake forms, organizations can streamline the incident reporting process and ensure that all necessary information is captured. These forms should include capabilities for conditional questions, multi-lingual support, and compatibility with a variety of channels such as phone, web portal, mobile, and chat.

This not only makes it easier for employees and customers to report incidents, but it also helps staff quickly and efficiently process those incidents from a central location, without dealing with data silos, incomplete documents, or misplaced files.

Mobile & Web Portal

Is your incident management process a hassle to access? Is it safe from data breaches? Does it allow for easy communication and collaboration across your organization and outside of it — without forcing you to jump around between systems, databases, or even paper documents? These problems can all stem from the absence of a mobile and web portal feature

1. Limited accessibility: Without a mobile and web portal, customers may have a difficult time reporting incidents, especially if they are not in a location where they can access a computer or if they have difficulty with traditional reporting methods like phone or email.
2. Lack of security: Without a secure portal, there is a risk that sensitive information may be compromised, leading to potential legal and reputational issues.
3. Inefficient communication: Without a centralized portal for incident reporting, customers and staff may have a hard time getting the information they need, leading to confusion, delays, and inefficiency.

A solution with both a mobile and web portal allows employees and customers to report incidents whenever and wherever they happen, providing a convenient and accessible way for them to log the issue and start the resolution process from a central system. Everyone involved can quickly get the information they need to resolve incidents in a timely manner.

Flexible Workflow Management

Are you struggling to manage incidents quickly or adapt to unexpected changes — like new regulations, equipment failures, or a pandemic-driven influx in incident reports?

These are common issues faced by organizations that lack sufficient workflow management capabilities:

1. Inefficient incident management processes: Without workflow management tools, organizations may struggle to handle incidents in a consistent and efficient manner, leading to delays and inefficiencies.
2. Lack of visibility into incident management activity: Without the ability to map incident management processes and track progress, it can be difficult for organizations to understand what is happening and identify areas for improvement.
3. Inadequate incident management controls: Without role-based permissions and multi-channel notifications, staff may not have the necessary tools to handle incidents effectively, leading to confusion, errors, or a growing backlog of incident reports.
4. Lack of flexibility in incident management: Without dynamic progression and automation in workflows, organizations may find it difficult to adapt to changing circumstances, leading to rigid processes that are not able to handle unexpected incidents, or to handle them inefficiently.

An incident management solution with advanced workflow management capabilities can simplify your internal processes substantially. They empower your team to streamline processes, map activity related to incident management, assign roles and permissions, automate tasks, and adjust quickly to any changes that may occur.

Scheduling & Assignment

Poor scheduling management processes can lead to confusion and delays in handling incidents. This can result in missed opportunities to quickly resolve equipment failures, production issues, and customer complaints — leading to lost productivity, increased costs, and poor customer service.

Scheduling & assignment tools allow you to easily manage incident management team schedules and assign dates and times for handling incidents. With the ability to communicate with customers and stakeholders, and quickly reschedule when necessary, you can improve incident management productivity, ensure timely resolution of incidents, and avoid potential losses.

Reporting & Analytics

Incident management activities can be difficult to track and measure, making it hard to identify patterns, improve processes, and measure success. This can lead to missed opportunities to identify and resolve issues, lack of data-driven decision making, and inability to measure and improve performance.

What does this look like without an incident management solution?

• Healthcare staff facing repeated complaints or concerns from patients, with no way to identify the root cause and make improvements, leading to poor patient satisfaction.
• Manufacturers dealing with recurring equipment failures, production issues or vendor problems, with no way to identify the root cause and make improvements, leading to lost productivity and increased costs.

A strong incident management solution will have an easy-to-read reporting & analytics dashboard, which will allow you to track incident management activity and other key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time.

It should include access to analytics and custom insights as well — this provides a comprehensive and accurate view of incident management activities and allows you to identify patterns, improve processes, measure performance, and make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.

Get all these capabilities in one place

3Di Engage is the complete incident management solution for your organization, providing any combination of these features to fit with your needs and budget.

• Quick deployment: 3Di Engage can be ready to use in as little as a few weeks, so you can start managing incidents and improving your processes right away.
• Affordable: 3Di Engage is affordable due to its low development costs from solution accelerators, so you get enterprise-grade software to match your budget.
• Customizable: 3Di Engage is fully customizable to match your specific needs. You can choose any or all of the features, or combine just a few.
• Integrates with everything you already use: 3Di Engage seamlessly integrates with other systems you already use, such as work order management, payment systems or ERP, so you can see everything in one place and streamline operations.

With 3Di Engage, you can identify, respond to, and resolve any type of incidents your organization faces.