How To Choose An Incident Reporting Software

Incident reporting is essential for problem resolution, which will save you money and ensure a safe working environment for all stakeholders. 

Here, we will briefly run through some factors you should consider when choosing the right incident management software for your organisation.

Why Is Incident Reporting Important?

The reporting of issues brings them to your attention so that you can start working on the fix! The faster you can identify a problem, the faster you can resolve it. This way, you can minimise the impact on your business. 

Continued reporting will allow you to spot any worrying trends and identify and rectify the root causes. This will nurture a safe working environment and a satisfied customer base.

Think About the Needs of Your Organisation when choosing a software

How important is incident reporting to your business? This will determine how much you are willing to spend on software and what capabilities you require. 

Consider what incident management system criteria and metrics are non-negotiable for you.

Important criteria to consider:

• The user interface & usability. You want an interface that looks professional and is thoughtfully laid out. It should be easy to use and you should have access to technical support.  
  
  
• Customisation & consolidation. Your tool should be able to respond to alerts from different platforms, organise them, and alert stakeholders as necessary. Everything should be customisable to meet the unique needs of your business! 
  
  
• Categorisation. You should be able to flag issues according to keywords and group them by category.
  
  
• Investigation tools. There should be a sequence of events that can be logged for each incident. This way, you can easily monitor the resolution progress and follow up on fixes. 
  
  
• Integration. The incident management system should easily integrate with other key software used by your business. 
  
  

Important Metrics to Decide On

Metrics allow for you to quantify a problem, the progress of the fix, and the success of the end solution. 

A good incident management system should provide you with metrics that make the most sense in the context of your business. 

Common metrics include customer satisfaction and resolved issues, quantified in percentages. When it comes to incident logging, you want a tool that will track the number of:

• Overall incidents
• Major incidents (those resulting in large financial losses)
• Recurring incidents
• Incidents requiring HR or external intervention
  
  

It’s All About the End-User

Because incident reporting is so important, you want a system that encourages the logging of incidents. The system should be intuitive, straightforward, and accessible from anywhere. So when choosing a system consider your end-user, the person who is in contact with your business every day and how you can encourage them better to report more of what they notice.  

Mobile-Friendly

For top accessibility, go for a solution that is mobile-friendly and on-demand. Since people are doing most of their daily interactions on the phone with apps that are on-demand, such as communicating, listening to music, ordering food, watching videos and more - why not enable them to do incident reporting too? 

By going mobile-first, you can get significantly more reports from the field that are close to real-time and more detailed! This will help you not only in spotting more trends and patterns of the incidents, act faster when needed, but also make better data-based decisions. 

Final thoughts

A good incident management system promotes a safe, efficient, and productive working environment. It is something that the whole company needs to be involved in. So, you need to choose incident reporting software that suits the needs of your organisation. 

Make it easy for everyone to report what they observe so that you can get information in real-time. This way, you can act on the incidents faster as well and optimise safety.

Are you looking for a tool to improve end-user involvement, incident management as well as other reactive reporting processes in your organisation? Falcony | Observe ticks all the boxes for low-threshold reporting, analytics and follow-up actions. Is easy to customise, enables real dialogue and a lot more.