False Alarms and Other Considerations

By Peter DeHaan

August 22, 2007

False alarms and erroneous error messages: if you have technology in your call center, then you have likely been frustrated by these events.  I was recently reminded of this as I searched for the source of an electronic alarm, warning me that something was awry in my house.  Since the beeping was intermittent, ascertaining its origin was a comedic effort.  With each alert I would quickly move in the direction from which I thought it was originating, come to an abrupt stop, cock my head, and attentively wait, scarcely breathing so that I could take in the full tonal effects at its next iteration.   I darted around the house in a haphazard zigzag pattern, often overshooting my mark.  It was as though I was playing the childhood game of "hot or cold" with the electronic gizmo taunting me with "you're getting colder."

Eventually, I found the culprit: a carbon monoxide detector.  In addition to the beeping, the power light was flashing red - even though the only documented options were solid green and solid amber.  Pressing reset didn't help, so I unplugged it for a few minutes; that had always worked in the past.  After an hour of futile troubleshooting, I began to consider that maybe it was working and there were actually unsafe carbon dioxide levels in my home. 

What a novel thought; in all my years at call centers, I never experienced a smoke, fire, or carbon monoxide alarm that correctly worked when it was supposed to.  In fact, I had been conditioned to assume that any alarm was the result of malfunction.  Smoke detectors were high on that list, with their low battery beeps and an occasional false alarm.  When I would test them, no one ever left their station to evacuate the building; no one ever asked if there was a fire.  The response was always one of irritation: "Make it stop so that we can hear our callers."

Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs) also seemed to do more harm than good.  It's confounding for a malfunctioning UPS to take down the servers and switch when perfectly good utility power is available.  Yet it happens.  For a while I kept track.  The UPSs were actually causing more downtime then they prevented.  Generators also fit that category.  Regardless if there was an automatic transfer switch or a manual bypass - that is, initiated either by technology or by people - inevitably something would go wrong.  Despite agent training and trial runs, nothing seemed to adequately prepared staff to deal with an actual power outage.

Spare parts and backup circuits were another cause for frustration.  You have them in case of an emergency, periodically testing them to make sure they are functional and viable.  Unfortunately, it seems that efforts to do so invariably result in unexpected side-effects and problems, including system crashes.

The last category of irritations involves data backups.  As if making successful backups isn't challenging enough, retrieval is fraught with peril.  Attempts to do so have crashed systems and corrupted good data. 

All these areas gives one pause to consider if such contingency efforts and provisions actually accomplish a net benefit or do more harm than good.  Regardless, it would be irresponsible not to do all that can be done to keep staff safe, systems functioning, lines open, and data secure.  The frustrations and false alarms are merely a side-effect that one must accept in the process.

As far as my issue at home, I ended up buying a new detector.  The replacement unit did not alert; apparently it was a false alarm after all.