Capturing Crisis Communication Events in Real-Time Using Whispir and Amazon EventBridge

By Anastas Manojlovski, Solutions Architect at Whispir

The increasing complexity and new capabilities of communications technologies are creating new market opportunities, risks, and threats that have the potential to substantially impact organizations.

Work is becoming more complex, collaborative, and fast-paced in the time of COVID-19. Globalization and advanced technologies compound complexity with multiple languages, time zones, and dynamic operational contexts to contend with.

Effective communication is more critical than ever.

In order to make communications easier for organizations and their stakeholders to manage, new cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies are responding to the need with the supply of streamlined and automated services.

With the role of crisis communications increasing in visibility, the capability of SaaS applications to facilitate actionable communications is paramount.

Whispir’s integration of Amazon EventBridge means the Whispir platform can power communication workflows between your applications, systems, and databases without the need to write any connection code.

Whispir is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner with the AWS Digital Customer Experience Competency. Whispir automates, personalizes, and layers communications using smart workflow technology on one easy-to-use platform.

The Rise of SaaS as an Organization Driver

SaaS apps are taking dominance in businesses and government operations. On average, organizations use around 16 SaaS products, and 73 percent of organizations suggest that nearly all of their apps will be SaaS products by the end of 2020.

“We’ve seen customers get a lot of value from combining the data from multiple SaaS applications,” says James Jory, Partner Solutions Architect at AWS. “At least a portion of an enterprise’s IT footprint is in SaaS applications, whether it’s a cloud-based CRM application, marketing tools such as Whispir that gathers engagement data across various channels, or running customer support on a platform such as Zendesk.”

As the demand for SaaS solutions increases so, too, is the supply of automation and easy-to-build applications.

Solution architects want to efficiently develop and implement their applications to:

• Take action in real-time:
  • The expectation of results in real-time. Trigger applications based on identity-based events instead of polling.
• Write less code:
  • Builders are expected to build and move faster in their working environments. Ingest, filter, and deliver events without writing custom code.
  • The less code you have to write, the less chance of errors; as well as becoming more agile.
• Pay for what they use:
  • Cost-effectiveness. No servers to manage or software to operate. Scale automatically and only pay for events published.
  • Consumption-based model.
• Easily build event-driven architectures:
  • Easier to build. Simplify the process as your event targets don’t need to be aware of event sources.

Global Pandemic Communication Guiding Principles

In the time of a global pandemic and the wide disruption to business continuity, real-time data collection and the capability to react quickly and efficiently is critical.

Tools like Whispir’s workflow communications platform allow organizations to set automated, personalized workflows that facilitate easy engagement and result in valuable data insights.

Whispir automatically uses the details, preferences, and metadata of an individual to send messages to the right person, with specific content leveraging the ideal communication channel: voice messaging, SMS, Whatsapp, and social networks, to name a few.

Whispir’s product is centered around a ubiquitous approach to messaging. A Low Code/No Code approach allows organizations to use the platform to affect workflow communication without dedicated developer talent.

In response to COVID-19, Whispir has developed 10 guiding principles to inform the decision-making process on how to effectively use communications during the major disruptions to business.

Figure 1 – Guiding principles to inform the decision-making process.

Whispir Crisis Communications Solutions

Whispir has decades of experience involved with emergency services, and has developed a range of customizable pandemic crisis communications templates covering a wide variety of scenarios.

When these templates are combined with their drag-and-drop template studio, it forms the basis of an organization’s crisis communications response and wider messaging needs.

The Whispir communications strategy combines rich messaging templates with the bulk and individual messaging features of the platform to address a variety of contact audiences.

Recipients can respond with details that can be used to further the process or kick-off new processes within Whispir or line of business systems.

Figure 2 – Templates for organizational and crisis communications.

Amazon EventBridge Integration

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus for ingesting and processing data across the Whispir SaaS platform. It makes a connection across various sources of data into any one application to enhance performance and insights.

Using the Amazon EventBridge integration, Whispir customers are enabled to further automate their workflow communications by linking their Amazon Web Services (AWS) account directly into their sends to harness real-time data.

The integration offers innovation to existing events features and alleviates the need for Whispir to provide individual callback or webhook functionality.

Whispir also enables users to pick the type of data required and have that data sent directly to their AWS account where they can safely consume and interact with it. Offering invaluable insights to inform the decision-making process in a communications strategy.

Enabling organizations to deploy sophisticated, data-driven, and personalized communications that enrich engagement with their customers.

Amazon EventBridge benefits organizations with:

• No hardware and maintenance
• Cross-platform
• Flexible payments and scalability
• Automatic updates
• White labeling and customization
• Ability to switch between providers
• App integration

Through the use of webhooks, Whispir is able to automatically process data requests and responses in real-time, while fulfilling intended communication outcomes.

By utilizing automated webhooks, Whispir’s platform events are automatically sent to AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose without disruption to the wider solution architecture.

Whispir’s integration with Amazon EventBridge means:

• Timely communications empowering users to take action and resolve tasks in real-time.
• Up-to-date information on events and status reports for stakeholders.
• Greatly speeds decision making, improve situational awareness, and increase responsiveness.
• Securely manage all active events at a glance, and uphold compliance with a record of all events.
• Potential to intelligently automate for any use case or process.

This integration of Amazon EventBridge enabled Whispir to build agile and efficient, event-driven, workflows that did not require any written connection code to enable Whispir Events.

Whispir was able to leverage Amazon EventBridge in our AWS environment for business-critical functions such as:

• Taking action:
  • Leveraging AWS Lambda to run code without the need for in-house servers. The cloud-based technology automatically scales the application by running code in response to each trigger.
• Running workflows:
  • AWS Step Functions enabled workflows to be created, tested and implemented quickly and efficiently. The added service of translating workflows into state machine diagrams allowed workflows to be understood across multiple stakeholders by minimizing the technical readouts into digestible information.
• Applying intelligence:
  • Utilizing Amazon Personalize and its machine learning (ML) capability, Whispir identifies user recommendations at an individual level and can create genuine and effective interactions.
  • Amazon SageMaker aids in ML capability by providing a toolkit for creating effective machine learning workflows while eliminating much of the time consuming and error-prone coding aspect.
• Auditing, analyzing, and housing data:
  • Amazon EventBridge webhooks SaaS data into Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, where data is organized into data lakes, data stores and analysis tools to garner insights.
• Synchronizing data:
  • Through the combination of Amazon EventBridge, Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB, data is able to be synchronized and sorted in real-time.

Conclusion

The Whispir platform excels at delivering streamlined communication processes for organizations.

With the latest integration into Amazon EventBridge, you can go from data to action. Whispir is enhanced to deliver even more intelligent workflows without the need to write any additional code or invest in additional technical labor.

Simplifying communication challenges is just the beginning. Whispir connects devices, systems, and people to create conversations, engage audiences, and streamline key communication processes for businesses worldwide.

With more than 35,000,000 interactions each month, Whispir ensures you reach the people you need on the platforms they use. Learn more about Whispir and AWS, and download a business guide for effective crisis communication.

The content and opinions in this blog are those of the third party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.

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Whispir – APN Partner Spotlight

Whispir is an AWS Competency Partner. Whispir automates, personalizes, and layers communications using smart workflow technology on one easy-to-use platform.

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