Who Gets the Call When Your Alarm Goes Off?

When was the last time you looked at the list of people your alarm company calls?

For many businesses, the answer is never. The list was filled out during installation. Maybe the original office manager did it. Maybe the previous owner. It has not been touched since.

Which means that right now, if your alarm goes off at 2 a.m., the monitoring center might be calling a manager who left last spring, a cell number that was disconnected, and a landline at an office you moved out of.

If you want a refresher on what a monitored alarm actually does, we cover that in a separate article. This one is about the part people forget: the list.

What happens when the alarm trips

The monitoring center gets the signal and follows the instructions on file for your account. Usually that means calling the premises or the first contact to check whether it is a false alarm, then working down the list, and dispatching police or fire based on the type of alarm and the responses they get.

Every step depends on the list. Who they call. In what order. What the passcode is. Whether someone can be reached who is able to say yes, it is real, or no, it is me, I forgot to disarm.

The exact process varies by monitoring company and alarm type. Ask yours to walk you through it. Most will happily do so.

Here is what goes wrong in practice. The center calls the first number. It goes to the voicemail of someone who left two years ago. They call the second number. It is the store landline, ringing in an empty building at 2 a.m. They call the third number and reach the owner, who is asleep, and who cannot remember the passcode when asked. Meanwhile, minutes are passing.

Or the reverse: the alarm was a false alarm from a cleaning crew, nobody on the list answered to cancel it, and now you are dealing with a police response and possibly a false alarm fine. Either way, the list is the problem.

Why call lists go stale

• People leave the business and nobody tells the alarm company
• Phone numbers change, especially when people switch from a work phone to a personal one
• The first person on the list is someone who never answers at night
• The passcode was set years ago and only one person still remembers it
• The business moved or added a location, and the list was never updated

None of these feel urgent day to day. They only matter when the alarm actually goes off, which is the worst time to find out.

Building a call list that works

Start by asking your monitoring company for the current list on file. Do not rely on your memory. Then rebuild it with these in mind:

• Put the people most likely to answer at night first, not the most senior people
• Include people who live close enough to go to the site if needed
• Use cell numbers, not office lines that ring in an empty building
• Keep the list short enough that the center can get through it quickly -- three to five people is typical
• Make sure each person knows they are on the list and agrees to it

If you have more than one location, keep a separate list for each. The person who lives ten minutes from your Staten Island shop is not much help for an alarm at your Jersey City location.

And think about who should not be first. A part-time employee may answer the phone, but can they make a decision about sending police, or about going to the building alone in the middle of the night? The first person called should be someone who can take responsibility for the answer.

Passcodes and what to say

The passcode, sometimes called a verbal password, is how the monitoring center knows they are talking to someone authorized. Without it, they cannot take instructions from that person.

Everyone on the list needs to know the passcode, and only those people. Change it whenever someone with it leaves.

Also give each person a simple plan for what to do when they get the call. Should they go to the site? Wait for police? Call the owner? A two-line note in their phone saves a lot of confusion when someone gets woken up.

Test it

Once the list is updated, call your monitoring company and tell them you want to run a test. They will put your account in test mode so police are not sent. Trigger the alarm and confirm the right people get the right calls in the right order.

While you are at it, ask everyone on the list to save the monitoring center's number in their phone with a clear name. A lot of calls go unanswered at night simply because people do not pick up unknown numbers.

Make reviewing the list part of your routine: whenever someone joins or leaves, whenever a number changes, and at least once a year even if nothing seems different. Adding it to your employee offboarding checklist is the easiest way to make sure it actually happens.

It takes about an hour. It is the difference between an alarm that gets handled and one that just makes noise.