Balancing Innovation with Urgency: The Impact of Automated Call Handling on Alarm Response Times

Emergency communications centers (ECCs) across the country are facing increasing pressures—from staffing shortages to growing call volumes—leading many to seek technological solutions that streamline operations. Among these solutions, AI-assisted automated call answering and interactive voice response (IVR) systems are gaining traction. Designed to manage non-emergency call volumes, these systems help ECCs optimize limited personnel resources. However, their unintended consequences are raising concerns among alarm monitoring companies and public safety professionals alike.

While automation may alleviate many burdens, there are situations where time is critical and automation can introduce significant delays. Specifically, when alarm companies are required to report incidents via non-emergency lines—now increasingly being answered by automated systems—the call handling time can increase dramatically, from approximately one minute to over six minutes per call. These delays slow down emergency response and can also compromise the alarm information being conveyed to responders.

The Alarm Industry’s Challenge
Alarm activations—whether from residential burglar alarms, commercial fire systems, or personal medical alerts—are inherently time-sensitive. Every minute of delay in dispatching a response can result in escalating damage, loss, or even life-threatening consequences. Traditionally, alarm companies are required to call ECCs using designated non-emergency numbers to report alarm activations requiring dispatch.

However, the introduction of IVR systems into this workflow disrupts the critical timing needed for alarm dispatch. Automated systems are typically not designed to recognize or prioritize alarm reporting calls, and are often inefficient in gathering and verifying all essential information such as an accurate location and cross-street details, premises-specific conditions, and cannot capture the Alarm Validation Score (AVS-01) level for intrusion alarms.

The lack of human intervention negatively affects the speed of emergency response, while increasing the likelihood of miscommunication or lost data—two unacceptable outcomes in public safety.

Understanding ECC Perspectives
The implementation of IVR systems in ECCs is not without justification. Many centers are under-resourced, understaffed, and struggling to meet service demands. Automation offers a temporary buffer—handling non-urgent requests like public information queries, administrative issues, or non-critical reports—allowing human 911 telecommunicators to focus on active emergencies.
From an operational standpoint, automation is both logical and necessary. Yet, treating alarm calls as non-critical simply because they arrive on a non-emergency line misses the nuance of their time-sensitive nature. Alarm systems are designed to detect and report threats in near real time. Treating these calls with anything less than immediate attention undermines the value they provide to public safety and the community at large.

Recommended Solutions
There are viable solutions to bridge this gap between ECC efficiency and alarm system urgency. Foremost among them is the implementation of the Automated Secure Alarm Protocol (ASAP), developed in partnership between TMA and public safety. ASAP provides a direct, bidirectional digital interface between alarm monitoring centers and ECCs, bypassing the voice call process entirely. This method eliminates delays, reduces human error, and enhances the consistency and accuracy of alarm data transmission.

For ECCs not yet equipped to adopt ASAP, an interim solution is to configure IVR systems to recognize calls from alarm companies and route them directly to live telecommunicators. This compromise maintains the benefits of automation for the broader public while preserving priority handling for alarm events.

Collaborating for Public Safety
Public safety is a shared responsibility. Alarm monitoring companies, ECCs, and technology providers must collaborate to ensure that efficiency gains do not come at the expense of timely emergency response. As AI and automation continue to evolve, their integration into emergency communications should be guided by a foundational principle: critical information must be transmitted quickly, accurately, and with minimal friction.

As a community, we should encourage ECC leaders and public safety officials to engage with the alarm industry to understand these challenges and explore solutions. Implementing thoughtful call routing policies, adopting standards like AVS-01, and investing in systems like ASAP can ensure that innovations in one part of the system don’t create vulnerabilities in another.
In the end, the goal is not to resist automation—it is to apply it wisely, always with the end mission in mind: protecting lives and property.

This blog was written by John Chiaramonte, Mission Critical Partners and PPVAR Board of Directors