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Reducing alert fatigue can sometimes feel a challenge, but it's time to take action and suppress the noise.

The benefits of reducing alert fatigue are almost endless, better engagement from users, critical notifications less likely to be missed and greater reputation for your IT team.

1. Target communications to only the relevant people

Limiting the amount of alerts that a users recieves is the most beneficial step you can take to reducing alert fatigue, particularly if the alerts that someone is recieving doesn't affect them. Giving the option to subscribe to certain office locations, services or technologies can help raise engagement with your incident communications. → Click to Tweet.

Target your notifications to only the relevant people and reduce redundant alerts to boost engagement with your incident communications. 

2. Ask users to opt-in to get updates on a particular incident 

Giving users the option to receive notifications on a certain incident can skyrocket the level of engagement you receive on alerts. → Click to Tweet. Allow users to be notified if there is a general update/workaround about an incident or just when the incident has been resolved. Segmenting your notification and alert types can help to reduce alert noise. → Click to Tweet. Plus if a user is expecting to hear from you about an incident, your alert fatigue will significantly reduce. 

3. Include workarounds/quick fixes to make alerts useful and actionable for users

Try to include useful and actionable information when you send notifications about an incident, even if it's just to let you know they've been affected by the issue. Include workaround information, but don't presume users will know exactly what to do - provide them with screenshots or links to save confusion. 

Allowing users the opportunity to notify the team that they've been affected by an incident can help to make an alert useful. 

4. Give responsibility to certain team members to authorise incident communications 

Assigning responsibility to authorising incident communications helps to limit unnecessary notifications being sent. → Click to Tweet. This could be your assigned incident manager/Service Desk manager or another team member. It's also a good idea for the team to clearly define critical, major incidents, and how these are communicated.  

Conclusions:

Being proactive in trying to reduce alert noise and fatigue can have huge benefits when it comes to boosting engagement from users. Plus, when you provide useful alerts that users want to receive, your brand as an IT service team is greatly improved and this can also help to limit alert fatigue.  

Want to learn more? Check out this collection of incident planning articles.