Supporting business and healthcare in the age of COVID-19 with Noggin.io and Twilio

Australian company Noggin has been in the crisis response, security, and incident management industry for more than a decade, helping companies and organizations worldwide better handle challenging situations with an integrated, all-hazards approach to safety and security management.

With solutions for crisis management, business continuity, environmental health and safety, emergency management, security management, and case management—in addition to industry packs for the utilities, education, and aviation sectors—Noggin is also uniquely equipped to empower companies of all types to manage the unique challenges the entire world faces in the form of COVID-19. They use Twilio to power those solutions.

A solution to navigate coronavirus challenges

To help their customer organizations, including businesses and frontline healthcare agencies, manage and mitigate the unique challenges COVID-19 has created, Noggin quickly launched two free Noggin Epidemic Response Modules – one for businesses managing their corporate response to COVID-19, and one for public health authorities and healthcare agencies. The free COVID-19 Noggin Epidemic Response Modules help agencies and businesses manage the crisis, protect their staff, operations, supplies, and supply chain, with the healthcare module allow operators to stand up a mobile healthcare command center

The challenges COVID-19 bring are vast and often unpredictable, with every news cycle bringing new considerations to the fore. With the module, Noggin gives organizations a dashboard for preparing and managing their coronavirus response. It includes considerations for business continuity, crisis management, travel risk management, and worker safety, with guidelines and tools for everything from case management of affected workers to communications with employees and suppliers. That’s where Twilio comes in.

“Communications is an important part of our solution, but not our core focus,” explained Owen Prime, the CTO/CISO at Noggin. “Communication delivery issues occupied more than their fair share of support requests and engineering time, so when we heard we could essentially outsource our communications to a specialist like Twilio, we were excited by the prospect.”

The organization had been using an aggregate of providers to send voice, text, and email messages, but knew that re-platforming was coming and wanted a better solution.

They chose Twilio for programmable messaging and Twilio SendGrid for emails as they embarked on improving their platform, and will soon incorporate Twilio Programmable Voice, utilizing text-to-speech technology, and Twilio Conference Calling as well. And, the organization has been experimenting with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) with promising results, Prime said.

The change has proven to be a great move for the organization, Prime added.

“Delivery reliability and confidence as improved,” he said. “Twilio has a great reputation and we’re happy that we can openly leverage that. We’re expecting the upcoming voice and conferencing features will have a great impact on the customer experience by being able to gather feedback from the recipient in voice, and support video conferencing.”

For it’s COVID-19-specific modules, Noggin integrates with Twilio Programmable SMS and SendGrid Email to issue alerts, notifications, and updates, and other use cases such as message-based welfare checks.

Customers using Noggin’s COVID-19 Epidemic Response Modules rely on those Twilio products to communicate updates about their organization’s or agency’s response and plans, to their workers, suppliers and other stakeholders.

Hundreds of organizations have signed up for the module since it launched in February, from 15 different countries including Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the USA, China, Israel, UAE, Kenya, Sweden, Belgium, and Norway.

Speaking to the adaptability of the platform, the customer organizations include everything from charities to museums, public health authorities and healthcare agencies, airports and government agencies, schools and sporting organizations, and virtually everything in between. One such customer is Arc Infrastructure, a transport infrastructure owner and access provider in Western Australia.

“The Epidemic Module provided by Noggin has enabled Arc Infrastructure to plan its response and management of workforce, travel and supply chain risks through intuitive checklists and dashboards,” said Tom Foskett, Governance & Risk Lead at Arc Infrastructure.

Partnering with Twilio has helped Noggin not only provide best-in-class communications solutions to its customers, but also support its internal team as well.

“For sales and customer success, our partnership with Twilio means explaining to customers that we use Twilio to deliver communications, which is a great sales tool as it helps build confidence in our ability to deliver the solutions,” Prime said. “For engineering, the APIs and SDKs are straightforward and well-documented, and for support, Twilio helps provide great interfaces to help customers check on the status of messages.”

Now, that partnership has enabled a rapid and powerful response to an uncertain time and threat. As demands shift and more organizations and agencies need powerful solutions to managing the crisis, Noggin—in partnership with Twilio—stands at the ready. Learn more at noggin.io.