A staff member pressed their Smart Badge button and no alert reached responders.
Work through the check below first. It splits the problem into two very different investigations, and starting in the wrong one is what usually makes this take a long time.
Before you troubleshoot
Open Alerts and look for the alert, including Alerts History in case someone has already resolved it.
- The alert is listed. The Alert Rule matched the badge press and did its job. The alert exists; the problem is that the right people were not told. Go to No one was notified, but the alert exists.
- The alert is not listed. No Alert Rule matched the press, so no alert was created. Go to No alert was created.
Also confirm what the staff member actually did: which button, and how many presses. That single detail resolves a large share of these reports.
Note: To view and manage Alert Rules, you must be assigned to the Staff Safe Administrator role. Roles are managed by those assigned to the User Management Administrator role.
No alert was created
Each cause below prevents an Alert Rule from matching the badge press.
The Alert Rule is disabled
Go to Settings > Alert Rules and check the Status column for every rule that should cover this staff member and location.
A disabled rule does not activate alerts for anything it covers — not for one administrator, but for every location it monitors and all of the staff it applies to. This is the single most common cause, and the most consequential, because the rest of the system looks healthy while it is in effect: badges report normally and nothing indicates that alerting is off.
Enable the rule. Then see Manage Alert Rules for why disabling a rule is worth coordinating rather than doing to reduce your own notifications.
The staff member is not covered by the rule
Open the rule and check the Applies To step. A rule covers specific staff, a Staff Role, or a Staff Group. If the staff member is not in whichever of those the rule uses, their badge press matches nothing.
This is easy to miss after a staffing change: a new hire is given a badge but not added to the Staff Group the rule uses, so their badge works and their alerts go nowhere. Check the staff member's Staff Role and Staff Group assignments in Staff.
The alert was activated where the rule does not apply
Open the rule and check the Locations step. A rule applies either by Location — the campuses, buildings, and floors it covers — or by Department, never both.
If the press happened somewhere the rule does not cover, the rule does not match. A rule that covers one building does not cover a staff member who walked to another, which is worth checking whenever alerts work in some areas and not others.
The rule is set to a different button
Open the rule and check the Conditions step. A rule activates on the Blue Button, the Red Button, or Any Button.
If the rule is set to one button and the staff member pressed the other, nothing happens. Where staff may use either button, set the rule to Any Button.
The badge was not pressed enough times
The number of presses that activates an alert is set on the badge, not in the Alert Rule. By factory default a Smart Badge requires three presses, and your organization may have configured a different number.
Fewer presses than the configured number does nothing at all — there is no partial activation and no feedback that a press was registered but discarded. Confirm the configured press count and what the staff member did. See About staff duress alerts.
The badge is not assigned to the staff member
An unassigned badge has no staff member to attribute an alert to. Check the badge assignment in Staff, and confirm it is assigned to the person who pressed it rather than to someone who previously carried it.
No one was notified, but the alert exists
The rule matched and the alert was created, so the cause is in the rule's Actions. Open the rule and check each configured notification method.
No notification method is configured
A rule needs at least one action to notify anyone. A rule saved without one still activates alerts and lists them, so the alert appears in Staff Safe while nobody is told about it.
The recipient list is empty or reaches no one
Check the recipients on each method:
- A User group with no members is valid to select but notifies nobody, so the rule can look complete while reaching fewer people than intended.
- A recipient who is no longer with the organization, or whose user profile was removed, no longer receives notifications.
The recipient summary on the Actions step shows who would actually be notified. Use it to confirm the rule reaches the intended people.
A recipient has no phone number
An email address is required for every Kio Cloud user, so email always reaches its recipients. A phone number is optional. A selected user without one is silently skipped for text messages and phone calls, and no error is shown.
The recipient list indicates when a selected user has no phone number. To add one, see Add a user.
The responders were notified but cannot act on the alert
Receiving a notification is not the same as having access to the alert. To acknowledge or resolve one, a person needs a Staff Safe role with access to alerts — so a recipient added as a plain email address, such as an answering service, can read the notification but cannot act on it.
See About user access to Staff Safe.
A webhook did not reach the third-party system
Webhooks are created and managed in Kio Cloud Company Settings and then assigned to a rule. Confirm the webhook is assigned to this rule, and that the receiving system is accepting requests.
Note that the action's Subject and Message are not included in a webhook payload, so instructions written there never reach the third-party system.
See Assign Webhooks to Alert Rules.
If the issue persists
Collect the following before contacting Kontakt.io support:
- The staff member's name, and the badge assigned to them.
- Where and approximately when the press happened.
- Which button was pressed, and how many times.
- Whether the alert appears in Alerts or Alerts History.
- The name of every Alert Rule that should have covered the press, and its status.
That set answers most of the first questions support would otherwise have to ask.