What questions should I ask a lone worker safety vendor?
Ask who physically answers an alarm and how fast, with a published number rather than a target. Ask what happens with no mobile signal. Ask what the total cost is over three years, including the licence. Most vendors will not answer the first one with a figure.
Anyone running a shortlist or a tender, usually after realising every vendor's website says roughly the same thing.
About the response, which is the part that matters
- Who answers an alarm: your own staff, a partner monitoring centre, or a notification to my own team?
- What is your median time to answer, not your target? Can you show the distribution rather than an average?
- Is the monitoring accredited, and to what grade in my country?
- What happens at 3am on a Sunday? Is it the same service as Tuesday at 10am?
- Walk me through a real incident from button press to resolution.
- What proportion of alarms turn out not to be emergencies, and how do you handle those without discouraging people from pressing the button?
A vendor that answers the response-time question with a target rather than a measured figure is telling you they do not measure it. Ours is a 7-second median, published with the methodology and the full distribution.
About coverage and failure
Push hard on the dead-zone answer. Every vendor has a coverage limit and the honest ones will tell you where it is. For genuinely off-grid work beyond all cellular coverage, satellite-integrated tools are usually a better answer than anything in this category, including us.
- What happens where there is no mobile signal? Be specific about my sites.
- What happens if the worker's phone is dead, or left in the car?
- How does location work indoors, in a basement, in a multi-storey building?
- What happens if your platform goes down? Is there a fallback path for an alarm?
- How long does the battery actually last in normal use, not in standby?
About cost, over the whole term
- What is the total over three years: hardware, licence, monitoring, SIM, support and replacement?
- Is monitoring included as standard or is it a paid tier?
- What happens to the price at renewal?
- What does it cost to add or remove twenty users mid-term?
- Who pays when a device is lost, broken or fails?
- Is there a minimum term, and what is the exit?
About whether people will use it
This is the question that decides whether the project succeeds, and it is almost never on a tender. A device that workers find bulky, embarrassing or awkward will sit in a drawer, and a system nobody carries protects nobody.
- Can I trial it with real workers, in their actual jobs, before committing?
- What does the device look like when worn? Is it obvious to a member of the public?
- How does a worker raise an alarm without visibly reaching for something?
- What does adoption typically look like at three months, and how do you measure it?
- What happens when someone triggers it by accident? Is that treated as a problem?
About the things a security team will ask later
Ask these early even though they arrive late. IT and security veto a large share of B2B deals at the final stage, and finding out in month four that a vendor cannot answer them wastes the whole evaluation.
- Where is the data hosted, and under which privacy law?
- Are you ISO 27001 certified, and can I see the certificate rather than a badge?
- Do you support SSO and automated user provisioning?
- Who inside your organisation can see a worker's location, and when?
- What is your data retention and deletion policy?