A hold-up alarm can be triggered if someone is robbing or otherwise threatening your business. The hold-up alarm is silent, so robbers won’t know that you’ve pressed it. It can be triggered by a button under the counter, or in an even more subtle, hands-free fashion by a trigger on the floor or one that can be pushed by a knee. When working with tills, it can also be attached to a clip of money that employees understand should only be removed when a robbery is taking place.

But what happens then? Who does the alarm go to? What do they do? Many people understand how they operate a hold-up alarm, but they don’t know the nature of the support they get from the people responding to it.

Monitoring – A hold-up alarm signal goes to a 24/7 monitoring center. They monitor a database of hold-up alarm signals constantly, even on holidays. These monitoring centers are trained in response.

Response – Some hold-up alarms can be triggered in different ways. For instance, they can be triggered simply in the case of a robbery or other threat. Alternately, you can enter a code that triggers a medical request, or a fire department request. It all depends on what you want your hold-up alarm to do. The monitoring center will contact the most relevant emergency responders – police, EMS, or fire included.

Emergency Services – Let’s take the most common example for now: a robbery. In this case, the monitoring service would notify the police and dispatch them to the scene.

It’s important to point out that police don’t come in guns blazing. It’s not the movies. This would escalate the situation and put lives at risk. Instead, police arrive and assess the situation first. It’s often more productive to let the robbers leave the building and then to apprehend them once you and your employees are safe.

All of this happens very quickly. It’s taken you more time to read this than it might for a monitoring service to receive a hold-up alarm and dispatch police to your business. That protects you, your business, and your employees.