Out-of-hours alerting for property and block managers

When a lift traps someone, a boiler fails or a fire alarm panel shows a fault at 2am, the person who can fix it needs to know straight away. Tocsin texts and phones the engineer on call for that building, and keeps escalating until someone answers.

No card needed for the trial. Tocsin is a product of Espresso Group Ltd, a UK company.

What a bad night looks like with Tocsin

A lift alarm at Tower Block B is logged at 02:14. Nobody is in the office. This is what happens next:

1. 02:14 Alert receivedArrives from your system as an email or webhook, marked critical.
2. 02:14 Text to the lift engineer on callTocsin looks up who covers Tower Block B tonight and texts them, with an email too.
3. 02:16 No answer, so the phone ringsA call reads the alert aloud, twice, in a clear British voice.
4. 02:19 Engineer replies "ACK"Escalation stops. The record shows who was contacted, how, and when they took it on.

If nobody had answered, the next step would have contacted the duty manager.

Set up in an afternoon

1. Add your people. Engineers, contractors and managers, each with a mobile number.
2. Build the rota. A schedule per patch or per building, with who is on call each week and overrides for holidays and swaps.
3. Decide who gets called. An escalation policy: text first, call two minutes later, then a manager.
4. Connect your systems. See below. Point each building's alerts at its own Tocsin address, and route each address to the right schedule.

Connecting your property and building systems

Tocsin accepts alerts from anything that can send an email or a webhook, so there is nothing to install. Most property, facilities, lift-monitoring and alarm systems can send an email notification when something urgent is logged.

• By email. Create an inbox in Tocsin for each building or system. It gives you a private address. Point your system's urgent notifications at it, and tell Tocsin which sending address to accept, so nobody else can raise alerts. Words like "critical" or "P1" in the subject set the severity.
• By webhook. If a system can call a web address, it can post alerts straight to Tocsin.

Subject: CRITICAL: Lift 2 entrapment, Tower Block B
From:    alerts@your-lift-monitoring.example

Email inboxes are included on the Team plan. We haven't built a connection to any particular property system, so check that yours can send email or webhook notifications. If you're not sure, ask us and we'll help work it out.

Why it suits property teams

• The right person for each building. Route by site and severity, so the lift contractor gets lift faults and the heating engineer gets boiler faults.
• It does not stop at the first try. Alerts escalate by text, then phone, then the next person.
• A clear record. Every alert shows each text, email and call and what happened. Useful when a resident, a client or an inspector asks what happened and when.
• Contractors included. Anyone with a mobile can be on a rota, whether or not they work for you.
• Any phone. Responders don't need an app. Texts and calls work on any mobile.

What it costs

The Team plan is £25 a month + VAT and includes unlimited schedules, phone call alerts, custom escalation policies and email inboxes. Texts and phone calls use prepaid credits, one credit each, from 20p down to 10p in bigger bundles. A text followed by a call to one engineer uses two credits, 40p at the standard rate. Emails are free. The free trial covers everything by email so you can try it out first.