On Call: Rotations, Cover and Emergency Paging
Decide who answers an emergency after hours — rotations, cover, a ladder that pages the next person when nobody answers, office hours, and acknowledging a page.
On call decides who answers an emergency when the office is closed. You set up a rotation — the people who take turns, how long each turn lasts and when it changes hands — and when an emergency comes in, Seayora pages whoever is on call. If they do not say "I have it" in time, it pages the next person, and keeps going until somebody does. It is under The building → On call on the website and in the On call, On-call pages, My on-call and On-call cover screens of the iPhone and Android apps.
Seayora pages people through the app, email and — if you turn it on — text message. It does not call anybody. Anyone in danger should call 911 first.
Turning it on
On call is off until you switch it on in On-call settings. While it is off, an emergency repair request does exactly what it always did: the account owner is alerted. You can still page whoever is on call by hand at any time with Page someone now.
With it on, Seayora pages for every repair request marked as an emergency, and — if you choose — for high-urgency requests too. An automation that decides a conversation is an emergency pages the same way.
Rotations
A rotation is a list of people in order. Each takes one shift in turn, starting from the top on the start date, and the next person takes over at the handoff time. A rotation holds up to 30 people, and an account can have up to 25 rotations.
| Each shift lasts | What happens |
|---|---|
| Every day | The next person takes over at the handoff time each day. |
| Every week | The next person takes over on the handoff day each week. |
- Shifts change hands at the wall-clock time in the rotation's own time zone, so a 9 am handoff is still 9 am after the clocks change.
- A rotation can cover every building or only the ones you choose. For an emergency at a building, a rotation that names that building is used before one that covers all of them.
- The backup is paged when the person on call does not answer. Leave it blank and the next person in the rotation is the backup.
- Only the account owner and people on your team can be on a rotation. Pausing a rotation means it pages nobody.
- On the website you drag people into order. On a phone, use Move a person to change the order — editing a rotation on a phone keeps everybody already on it in their place.
Cover
Cover puts somebody else on call for a while — a swap, a sick day, a holiday — without changing the rotation. It wins over the rotation for its window, and the most recently added cover wins if two overlap. Cover can last up to 90 days at a time and its times are in the rotation's time zone. Anybody on your team can put themselves on cover; putting somebody else on call is for the account owner or a manager.
What happens when an emergency comes in
- Seayora works out who to page, in order: whoever is on call (or covering), then the backup, then the last person to page — which is the account owner unless you choose somebody else.
- The first person is paged. They have the time you set to acknowledge (10 minutes unless you change it).
- If nobody acknowledges in time, the next person is paged, and so on down the list.
- After going through the whole list the number of times you set (2 unless you change it), the page is marked Nobody answered and the last person to page and the account owner are told.
- The moment somebody acknowledges, the page stops and everybody already paged is told they can stand down.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Paging | Waiting for somebody to say they have it. |
| Acknowledged | Somebody has it. |
| Resolved | Dealt with. |
| Nobody answered | Everybody on the ladder was paged and nobody acknowledged. |
| Cancelled | Called off — not an emergency after all. |
| Where a page comes from |
|---|
| Emergency repair request |
| Emergency in a conversation |
| Paged by hand |
Saying "I have it"
Acknowledge a page from the notification, from On call, or from My on-call on a phone. Acknowledging the repair request on the maintenance board stops its page too, and acknowledging the page acknowledges the repair request — there is one meaning of "somebody has it". With Tell the resident switched on, the resident's request says the on-call team has it and is on the way. It never names who.
A page that turns out not to be an emergency can be called off by the account owner or a manager, with a reason — everybody already paged is told it was called off, and why. Mark a page resolved once it is dealt with, with a note of what was done.
How people are paged
- Every page reaches the Seayora app and its notifications. On-call pages cannot be switched off in notification settings — the way to stop being paged is to hand your shift to somebody else.
- By email as well (on unless you switch it off).
- By text message as well, if you switch it on — to the number on each person's account, through your text-message gateway, at any hour, including quiet hours.
- Seayora does not phone anybody. If you want a phone number that rings whoever is on call, that is a call-forwarding service you set up with your phone provider.
Office hours
If somebody is at the office during the day, switch on "During office hours, page the office instead" and set the days and hours. Inside those hours an emergency goes straight to the last person to page rather than the rotation.
Settings
- Minutes to acknowledge: from 2 to 120.
- Times through the list: from 1 to 5.
- The last person to page, who is also told when nobody answers.
- Also page for high-urgency requests, email and text message, office hours and their time zone, and whether to tell the resident.
Only the account owner or a manager can change settings and rotations. On a management company account, team members need access to Maintenance to see On call — except their own shifts and pages in My on-call, and acknowledging or resolving a page they were paged for, which everybody on the team can always do.
On the calendar and with an assistant
Every on-call shift appears on the calendar under On-call shifts, with your own shifts highlighted.
A connected assistant can tell you who is on call now and next, who would be paged for a building, and list the pages and who picked them up. It cannot page anybody or acknowledge a page — an emergency must not wait in an approvals queue, and "I have it" has to come from a person.
Related features and guides
- Resident Surveys After a Repair — Documentation. Ask residents how a repair went once it is finished, choose when and what to ask, and read the answers and your Net Promoter Score.
- Voice Messages After Hours — Documentation. Have the voice messages residents and customers send you written out under the recording, let your automations act on the words, and answer a call that rings out with an invitation to leave a voice message.
- Contacts, the Pipeline & Follow-ups — Documentation. The contact book for landlords, management companies and contractors: who gets added for you, where each person stands, the next step and the score, logging calls, follow-ups, automations, insights, importing and deleting.
- AI Financial Analyst — Feature. An AI layer over your accounting data that surfaces trends, anomalies, and answers about your portfolio finances without building a report first.
- AI-Assisted Estimates & Quoting — Feature. AI-assisted estimating with materials prediction, 3D scan input, permit checks, and online quote approval — so quoting stops being unpaid after-hours work.
- Call Recording & Consent — Feature. Where enabled, calls can be recorded or transcribed for quality and dispute resolution — with recordings attached to the conversation and consent obligations made explicit.