Assistance provider or risk advisory: which does your company need?

An assistance provider sells the response. Your people carry a number, and when one of them is injured, falls ill, loses a passport or has to leave a country at short notice, an assistance center takes the call, finds a clinic, guarantees the cost, arranges the transport and brings the person home. The network behind the number is the product, and it is built so that one procedure serves many clients. Most of the time that is exactly what is needed.

A specialized risk advisory sells the decisions before the call. Whether the trip or the project should go ahead and under what conditions, what the traveler is told beforehand, who may decide what when something happens, which hospital has actually agreed to take a patient, and who verifies that the driver and the escort were briefed. It works for one organization at a time, starting from that organization's sites, people and contractors, and it leaves a record of what was assessed and arranged before anything happened.

Where the trips are routine, the destinations have working hospitals and the worst plausible case is one that an assistance center can settle with a phone and a cost guarantee, an assistance contract on its own is a reasonable answer. A sales team covering Western Europe, a conference in Singapore, a plant visit in a city with an international clinic. Incidents are rare in those environments, and the response is the part that has to work.

Once the decision itself carries the risk, an advisory becomes necessary. Projects in countries where the hospital on the map will not take the patient. Sites with no road out after dark. Contractors who outnumber your own staff. A board asking whether the duty of care has been met and what the file would show. In those cases the assistance provider keeps its place as the last line of a program, and the program has to be designed first.

In most difficult environments the answer is both, and the order matters. The advisory sets the approval thresholds, writes the briefing and the escalation chain, settles the receiving hospital and verifies the local providers. The assistance contract is then written into that chain at the point where it belongs, with the assistance center holding the same procedure your duty manager holds. Bought the other way round, the number exists and nobody has settled what your own duty manager does until the assistance center takes over.