A construction company asks for a guard on a site overnight. What they actually need is to know if anyone comes onto it, and a guard is the only solution they have heard of.
Remote monitoring might cost a third as much and work better, or it might be impossible at that site, and nobody has asked the questions that decide which.
Step 1: establish what they are protecting against
Theft of plant, metal theft, vandalism, trespass, fly tipping or a compliance requirement from an insurer. Each suggests a different arrangement.
Step 2: check power and connectivity
Mains power, whether a temporary supply exists, whether solar is viable and what the mobile signal is like. A site with neither power nor signal changes the whole proposition.
Step 3: establish what needs covering
Perimeter, compound, plant, material stores, access points. Covering everything is rarely necessary and covering the wrong thing is common.
Step 4: explain the detection approach
What triggers an alert, how false alarms are managed and what happens when something is detected. False alarms are what destroy confidence in these systems.
Step 5: explain the response arrangement
Audio challenge, a call to a keyholder, a call to the police or a mobile patrol attending. Each has different costs and different timescales, and the client needs to choose knowingly.
Step 6: be honest about police response
What triggers a police response depends on the system, its registration and local arrangements. Never imply a response that cannot be relied upon.
Step 7: explain deployment and duration
How quickly equipment can be installed, whether it is hired or bought, what happens when a site finishes and whether it moves to the next one. Construction clients need portability.
Step 8: separate lone worker protection entirely
A device or app, check-in schedules, alarm activation, what the monitoring centre does and escalation to named contacts. It is a different service with different obligations and is frequently bundled confusingly with site monitoring.
Step 9: establish the lone worker situation properly
How many workers, what they do, where, at what hours, what the risks are and who escalation should reach. This determines the arrangement and it is a safety matter rather than a product choice.
Step 10: explain reporting
What the client receives, how activity is logged and what evidence exists after an incident. For insurance and for compliance this is often the point of the whole system.
Step 10b: explain what happens to the footage
Clients want to know how long recordings are kept, who can view them, how evidence is provided after an incident and what happens to images of people who were simply passing. Setting this out plainly matters for a client whose own obligations depend on it, and it is the part of a proposal that the person signing usually has to justify internally.
Step 11: quote from a site assessment
Photographs, a layout and ideally a visit. Quoting remote monitoring blind produces a system that watches the wrong things, which is the detail problem in alarm and CCTV quote requests that need site details.
Step 12: sites enquire out of hours
Site managers contact suppliers early and late, and after an incident, which is the pattern in monitoring and response questions security firms hear and commercial fencing enquiries from sites and schools.
Getting started
Publish what you monitor, what you need to quote and how response works, then capture site details at any hour, much as described in an AI receptionist for opticians. SpideyChat for security companies answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.