Following a phone call with the 24/7 professional monitoring center, we were informed that the #1 contact in our list was not visible. We can see all of the contacts in order on our portal under professional monitoring, but the monitoring center says that they only see the #2 contact. We then duplicated the #1 contact as #2 (moving the old #2 to #3), and the agent on the phone was able to see this one. It seems there is an issue with the visibility of our #1 contact, is this a known issue, or can this be investigated somehow?
We were initially made aware of this after our site had an alarm go off, and this #1 contact did not receive the call, rather the #2 contact did.
Hello, thanks for bringing this to our attention. I am seeing three contacts in your contact list in your monitoring station account. One is a duplicate.
All contacts appear to be in your list, however I think I see what caused the issue with that first contact. I am going to reach out to our monitoring station supervisor team to verify but it looks like they may have had multiple failed attempts to reach the first contact and an operator indicated it may be a bad number.
The operator you spoke to looks like they did not see it because it was marked as bad/unreachable.
I will follow up with you shortly.
Hello, was that first contact initially entered with a placeholder number during activation? It looks like the number previously was submitted as 555-555-5555, which is why it was marked as a bad contact.
Hello Jason, thank you for taking a look at this for us. I do not believe that this was a placeholder contact. Additionally, we have attempted removing it and adding it again, and the monitoring station agent noted that they still could not see the #1 contact. It was never added with the number 555-555-5555 as far as I am aware.
Additionally, we have attempted removing it and adding it again, and the monitoring station agent noted that they still could not see the #1 contact.
That first contact is still listed as a bad number, so the operator would not be seeing it as a selectable contact.
When the activation was completed initially, that phone contact was submitted with 555-555-5555 according to records. Later, that contact was edited and a second contact was added.
I have now manually removed that bad number identifier. Currently you have two of the same contact listed back to back. You should be able to now verify with the monitoring team now that they can see both contact 1 and 2 with that same number. Contact 3 is the other individual.
Thank you for doing that for us, Jason. I gave the monitoring team another call, and they were still unable to see contact #1.
We have also tried deleting the #1 contact and adding it again, still no luck
Try that again now. I have re-saved that number for the first contact for you, so that status should no longer be stuck. Does that resolve the issue?
If there is still an issue, I can instead just delete that first contact instance on our end, and the contacts will shift up.
Hello Jason. Thank you very much. I have spoken with the monitoring team, and they confirmed they can now view contact #1.
We plan to deploy the Surety monitoring service to multiple sites in the future. Is there any way that we can prevent this issue from happening moving forward?
Looking in the change-log I can pinpoint the event where the number was marked bad. It was without question due to the number being submitted as 555-555-5555. Shortly after submission it was marked in the monitoring account as an obviously invalid number to ensure operators do not attempt contact during an emergency.
The numbers entered into the activation form are never sent with any placeholders, and you can enter two contacts during activation. Ensure those are entered accurately, and additional contacts can be added and edited later.
The account is placed in test mode for 7 days when activated so that you can test and cause alarms without triggering dispatch.
It looks like that number was edited after the Becklar monitoring team assigned that bad number status. I am working with our IT team to ensure that will reset that bad number status in the future if an invalid number is ever entered accidentally again.