Business Alarm Maintenance Tips

You’ve invested a lot into your business: your time, money, and lots of hard work. A professionally installed business alarm system with 24-hour professional monitoring can help protect that investment. However, your business alarm system isn’t something you should install and forget about. Here are five actions you can take to make sure your business alarm system is operating at peak performance for your business.

Action 1 – Update your contact person and contact phone numbers

When your office alarm system goes into alarm, the monitoring station operators need to contact the correct people as quickly as possible. Reaching the right person can help prevent accidental dispatches of the police by helping the operators confirm that an actual alarm event has occurred. If a break-in has occurred, the police will request that the business’s contact person respond at the site physically. If the monitoring station operators have the wrong contact person or invalid phone numbers to call, valuable time is lost when responding to the emergency.

Action 2 – Update your alarm system’s individual user codes

As you are hiring or letting go of trusted employees who open or close your office, you should add and delete individual alarm user codes for these individuals. There are many reasons for your business to use individual alarm user codes for your employees. The two key benefits are 1) it allows you to monitor employee access to your office, and b) it limits employee access to your office. So remember, when you have to terminate an employee, don’t forget to delete their alarm user code. If you have a business alarm system from A-Bell, all you need to do is give us a call. We manage individual user codes for all of our business clients and will remotely delete or add user codes for your employees. 

Action 3 – Update your alarm system “password” or “abort code” 

As you hire and let go of employees, remember to change the “password” or “abort code” for your alarm system. The password or abort code is a particular word or phrase provided to the monitoring station operators to identify you as a “trusted” individual they can communicate with regarding the alarm system. Leaving an old “password” or “abort code” in place after an employee leaves would allow a former employee to be able to come back to your business, set off the alarm, and cancel police dispatch with the monitoring station by using the old password/abort code. While this doesn’t happen often, you can easily avoid this potential loss to your business caused by former employees by calling your alarm company and changing your password/abort code.

Action 4 – Train new employees in alarm system use 

As you hire new employees and you are giving them a key and alarm code to access your business location, it is vital to take some time to train them on the use of your alarm. Not all alarm system turn on and off the same way, so don’t assume they will automatically know how to operate your business’s alarm system even if they have used an alarm system before. Training also helps them understand what actions to take during different situations such as, if they accidentally set off the alarm or if the alarm is sounding when they arrive. This training does not have to be overly involved, but it is an important investment that pays dividends in overall system use. Visit our YouTube channel for some how-to alarm use videos you can share when training your employees.

Action 5 – Ask for a site security re-inspection after an office redecoration or remodel

As your business needs change, the way you use your business space may require you to remodel or redecorate. Sometimes, the changes you need to make to your business space can negatively affect the effectiveness of your alarm system. For example, has a motion detector been obscured by a new tall decorative plant placed in the corner or a room? Have storage shelves been added to a wall where items on the shelves now block a motion detector? Have high wall cubicles been added that isolate windows which, when broken, would have previously caused a glass break detector to go into alarm but now won’t? In our 50 years in business, we’ve seen all of these scenarios. If you’ve remodeled or redecorated our business space, call your alarm company to have them perform a security re-inspection to make any necessary adjustments to keep your alarm system at peak detection effectiveness.