My situation might not be common, but there are 17 organizations within our system, and upper management wants to know about all notifications at every level. Right now, I have to manually enter the notifications, and there is no copy function across organizations. 

It would be immensely helpful if I could take a contact record, save it to the clipboard, and duplicate it across other organizations within my system. I've had to create a template and upload that to 17 organizations. I have to duplicate that in a spreadsheet, with multiple rows for each organization, and upload that file. That's how I'm populating it rather than manually typing in every record in every organization for the president and all their contact information. 

There are a few quirks in the interface that drive me nuts. It seems trivial, but when you have thousands of records, you want to see more than 25 results per page. I have to change the settings for results per page each time I switch between one of our 17 institutions. It's a bit irritating to do that 17 times in an hour. I should be able to change that default setting and permanently store it. They also changed the search query to search by phone instead of name. Who looks for somebody using a phone number? It's just kind of little silly things that I don't think they use in a large-scale environment like I am. 

Reporting is something Everbridge should improve. It's pretty basic. The tool has some reports, but you often need to go down to the Excel level and do it yourself. It would help if the solution had more robust in-app reporting tools and technology that offer an analysis of what you've sent out and some more details. 

I would also like to see more delivery methods. Everbridge sends messages via email, text, and phone, but what about Teams? We have people on Teams, which is another delivery method we could use to send information quickly. 

When using the simulation mode, the capacity to send an email or text message to a small test group would be good, so those practicing with the solution can see what notifications look like on the user end.

Everbridge has a huge amount of documentation, which is great. I think they've done a wonderful job on that. However, it can be difficult to sort through all of that to find what you need but I am glad they have it and it is up to date. 

They have a vast knowledge base for help articles, and it can be a little overwhelming sometimes. Trying to dive into specific use cases takes time. 

You can manage the structure of the groups in two different ways, and I'd like to see some consolidation. They have something called "groups" and another called "rules." You can achieve your objective with either, but it's somewhat redundant. 

I would also like to have more visibility into logins. They could reduce the steps I need to take to troubleshoot failed notifications, carrier issues, or folks who have stopped SMS messaging. I can get there, but it takes a fair amount of drilling down and investigating to answer the question. It would be helpful to have more visibility on the back end.

We now have a lot of our staff members who can get into the Everbridge system and do various things, and the way Everbridge has set up permissions is somewhat tricky. Administrator-level permissions could be more intuitive. It could be easier to give people the specific permissions you want them to have. 

Also, there are a lot of integrations with third-party applications and services. Some of the documentation could be a little better on how exactly to integrate with those applications.

We have some issues regarding the template layout; we have about 80 templates and must scroll through a long list to find the one we want. It would be good to see subcategories or the ability to filter through the templates somehow.

Everbridge can send out conference bridge meetings, but as nobody uses conference calls anymore, we would love to be able to generate Zoom links through the solution. That would be extremely helpful.

Regarding improvement, it could be clearer around selecting groups of users to notify; it could be more intuitive to pick who we want to send messages to.

In terms of pain points, it was more difficult to reach out to staff in the way that is most effective for them.

There are certain aspects of the system that don't work exactly as I would like them to. I've been working with them literally for years to get certain things resolved, and there are always issues and problems. One of the issues that we've been dealing with recently and for some time now is that some people don't get the message. It goes out to 27,000 people, and afterward, I hear from people that they did not get the message, or their phone didn't ring, and it didn't go to voicemail. Nothing happened, and they were just dropped. This seems to be an ongoing issue.

In conjunction with that, there is an ability for me to download a spreadsheet that lists what happened with the outgoing call. It lists everybody included in the call and what they should have received. In other words, if they hung up, if it went to the voicemail, or if they picked up and answered, all that is in the database/spreadsheet. That doesn't seem to correspond to reality in all cases. Sometimes, it says that people got the call, but they didn't.

Another issue is that when the call comes in, it sometimes gets truncated, so the beginning of the message is missing from the call. These are all glitches that we've been working on with them, and they're still ongoing. If you let it go to voicemail, it records your message, but sometimes, it truncates the beginning. What happens is that in the end, it says, "To repeat this message, press two", and then it says that three times. If you do not press two, it repeats the message anyway, so that winds up with a long voicemail message on people's machines or voicemails.

If the user could personalize their dashboard a little bit more, that would be helpful.

Also, we were using Everbridge HIPAABridge, but we recently did away with that. Some things did not get to people in a timely manner. It was supposed to be just like text messaging, but sometimes providers received things late or not right away.

Because we were pleased with Everbridge Mass Notification, we went with HIPAABridge, which was the secure chat. But when they made changes to that platform, our health system wasn't pleased with it because there were a lot of things missing. HIPAA Bridge was good. It wasn't perfect, but it did what it needed to do. When they sunset that particular product or they rebranded it, they got rid of HIPAABridge and changed it to just Everbridge. And when that happened, the look changed and some of the functionality changed as well. Some things were taken away instead of things being added. 

Along with that change came glitchiness and delays, and it was not user-friendly. That is what made us get rid of it. And now, we use a different vendor for secure messaging and that product is easier to use.

One place where Everbridge can be improved is its language libraries. It is weak on languages. Because we are trying to deploy it globally, it affects our usage across languages. They have some weaknesses in that area and it is really noticeable when trying to scale globally.  

Online training materials and support documentation could be improved.

An additional feature that should be included in the next release would be a contact database upload/download/sync.