Why Most Operation Managers Hate Taking Customer Phone Calls

Trackforce

March 30, 2015 · 12 min read

Security operations manager taking a customer phone call

The phone rings. “Ring. Ring.”

You check your caller ID, see that it’s one of your customers, and think, “Oh no. What went wrong now?”

Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, that’s exactly how most operations managers at security firms operate. After all, it’s pretty rare to have a customer call you to say how awesome your guard is doing or how much they appreciate your hard work.

After spending more than 26 years in the industry, I have heard it all. Listed below are the most common reasons operations managers in the security industry hate answering customer phone calls.

Key takeaways

Almost every dreaded call is a visibility problem wearing a service complaint.
The client is ringing because they cannot see what happened. If they could, most of these calls would never be made.
Three calls cover nearly all of it.
Guard performance, the report, and the invoice. They look like three problems and are mostly one.
Without a record, every complaint is settled on goodwill.
That usually means a credit, an apology, or a replaced officer, whether or not the complaint was fair.
A billing dispute is rarely about the invoice.
Delayed payment is usually a signal the client is unhappy or undervaluing the service, so the invoice is the symptom rather than the cause.
The goal is not to win the call, it is to remove it.
A client with their own view into security operations checks for themselves and stops ringing to ask.

They’re going to complain about guard performance

Poor guard performance covers a whole slew of possibilities including:

The officer showed up late to the post, or left a little early, or both.
The officer wasn’t properly dressed or groomed. We’ve all probably had an officer show up in their weekend, “I’m here to relax” outfit rather than the professional (expensive) one you provided.
The customer caught the officer out of position (like asleep in their car) or even worse, in an unauthorized area. Here is an article on geofencing versus breadcrumb tracking to make sure this never happens again.
The customer complains about the new officer you put on site because their usual guy called off sick at the last minute. It just so happens that the new guy wasn’t listening to the supervisor during training and didn’t bother reading the post orders, which you spent hours writing.

Notice that three of those four are answerable with a record. Clock-in times, checkpoint scans and position data settle “was anyone there” in seconds, and having the post orders and current certifications attached to the assignment in guard management means a last-minute replacement arrives briefed rather than guessing.

They’re going to complain about the report

The reports always seem to be a hot topic, including when:

The officer didn’t include enough details about an event in the incident report, like where it happened.
Or the officer included the wrong address, which caused your customer to deliver a violation to the wrong resident.
Maybe the officer wrote a detailed report but the handwriting was so bad that it looked like a different language. The security industry is notorious for this.
Another common complaint is that the officer failed to report an emergency event, like in the example below.

“I had a customer call me one time because the officer failed to report that the fire department was called on site. I later learned that the fire department and first responders responded to the property because a tenant thought they saw smoke coming from the dumpster. It turned out to be a false alarm so the officer didn’t feel the need to include the event in his incident report. Or so he said. I checked the GPS location of his earlier reports and found that he was reporting from his house.” — James M., Operations Manager, Atlanta

That story is the whole argument in one anecdote. The complaint was about a missing report, but what actually solved it was position data on the reports that were filed. Guided required fields stop a report being submitted without a location, and ReportPro AI deals with the legibility problem by turning rough field notes into something a client can read, while keeping the officer’s original text alongside it.

They’re going to dispute their bill

The chances are pretty good that you have an entire department dedicated to handling these complaints. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to collect from your customers in the security industry. Delayed payments can be a sign that the customer is either not happy or that they are undervaluing your services.

Luckily, we have four techniques for collecting on past due accounts without losing the customer.

The structural fix, though, is upstream of collections. When verified hours flow straight through to contracts and invoicing rather than being retyped from a timesheet, the hours you worked and the hours you billed are the same hours, and each invoice line has the tour record sitting behind it. A dispute then becomes a two-minute look at the data instead of a negotiation you settle with a credit.

Turn each dreaded call into something checkable

Read the three sections above again and a pattern emerges: almost none of these calls are really about service failure. They are about the client having no way to see what happened, and you having no way to show them. Here is each call against the record that ends it:

The call you dread	The evidence that ends it	Where it comes from
“Your officer showed up late and left early”	Clock-in and clock-out times captured on the device at the moment they happened	Time and attendance in guard management
“Nobody was at the post when I looked”	Timestamped, position-stamped checkpoint scans across the whole shift	The guard tour system
“Your officer was somewhere they should not have been”	GPS position attached to every scan and report, with geofence boundaries set per site	Tour data and mobile patrol tracking
“The report left out where it happened”	Guided required fields, so a report cannot be submitted half-finished	Structured incident reporting
“I could not read the report”	Typed, structured entries with AI assistance to tidy rough field notes	Incident reporting with ReportPro AI
“Your officer never told us about the incident”	Reports filed in-tour rather than written up at shift end, with escalation flags	In-tour reporting and dispatch
“We are not paying this invoice”	Verified hours carried through to the invoice, with the tour record behind each line	Contracts and invoicing

The middle column is the same for every row: something captured at the moment it happened rather than reconstructed afterwards. That is the entire difference between a conversation you dread and one you can have in ninety seconds.

Get ahead of the call

Answering complaints well is the defensive game. The better one is making the call unnecessary:

Give the client their own view. A client who can check completed tours and logged incidents themselves stops ringing to ask whether anyone was there.
Send the weekly summary before they ask for it. Reporting that arrives unprompted reframes you from supplier to partner, and it costs nothing once business intelligence assembles it automatically.
Report your own exceptions. Flagging a missed checkpoint yourself, with what you did about it, buys more credibility than a flawless sheet nobody believes.
Name the escalation path in writing. Who the client calls, on what number, and the target response time. Most angry calls are angry because nobody knew who to ring.
Make the replacement officer arrive briefed. Post orders, site notes and access details attached to the assignment, reachable from the guard app on their first shift at a site.
Book a standing review. A short monthly call on agreed numbers means issues surface there rather than as a surprise at renewal.

A 30-day plan to reduce inbound complaint calls

Days 1 to 7: log the calls you actually get. Write down every client call for a fortnight and categorise it: performance, report, invoice, or something else. Most managers are surprised by the split.
Days 1 to 7: pick your noisiest account. One client usually generates a disproportionate share. Start there, because the improvement will be visible fastest.
Days 8 to 14: close the evidence gaps. Make sure the site has checkpoints where the client actually looks, and that reports cannot be filed without a location.
Days 15 to 21: give that client a view and a weekly summary. Then stop waiting for their call and see what happens to the volume.
Days 22 to 30: agree the escalation path and the monthly review. Put both in writing, then roll the same pattern out to the next two accounts.

Although I can’t promise to solve all of the problems listed above, and there’s not much I can do about the officer’s grooming habits, I have helped hundreds of companies overcome these problems and more.

You can book a demo with one of our product specialists, who are dedicated to helping companies just like yours use TrackTik to manage their guards and retain their customers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Because good service is invisible and problems are not. A covered shift produces no event for the client to notice, while a missed checkpoint produces an immediate one. That asymmetry is why proactive reporting changes the relationship so much: it gives the client something to see when nothing has gone wrong, which is the only way the balance of contact ever shifts.

Look it up rather than defending or apologising first. Timestamped, position-stamped checkpoint scans tell you within a minute whether the officer was there, and either answer is useful. If they were, you show the record calmly. If they were not, you already know before the client escalates, and you can lead with what you are doing about it. A guard tour system is what makes that a lookup instead of an argument.

Treat the dispute as information. Delayed payment in this industry is usually a signal the client is unhappy or undervaluing the service rather than a genuine arithmetic disagreement, so ask what changed before you defend the number. Then make the line checkable: when verified hours flow through to contracts and invoicing, each invoice line has a tour record behind it and the conversation stops being adversarial.

It reduces them, which surprises people who expect transparency to invite scrutiny. The calls you get are mostly requests for information, so giving the client a way to answer their own question removes the reason to ring. What does change is the nature of the remaining calls: fewer “was anyone there” questions and more substantive conversations about the service itself.

Accept that the complaint is usually fair and fix the briefing rather than the officer. A replacement who has never seen the site and has not read the post orders will underperform regardless of ability. Attaching post orders, site notes and access details to the assignment so they are reachable from the guard app on arrival removes most of the gap, and knowing who is qualified and available in advance means the replacement is a better match to begin with.

A short weekly summary and a monthly review pack covering covered shifts, completed tours, incidents with outcomes, and response times. Keep it to what the client will actually read rather than everything you can produce. Because business intelligence assembles it from the operational record automatically, sending it unprompted costs almost nothing and is the single cheapest change to the relationship.

Check the record before you form a view. If the data shows the work was done as contracted, you have a communication problem and the fix is reporting and expectation setting. If the data shows it was not, you have a service problem and the fix is supervision, scheduling or the officer. The mistake is guessing, because treating a visibility gap as a performance failure damages good officers and treating a performance failure as a misunderstanding loses the client. You can book a TrackTik demo to see what that record looks like on a live site.