We currently have no front desk person, and clients come to pick things up frequently. When they arrive, they have to ring a call bell. Today, a client came in and rang the bell, but the bell malfunctioned, so none of us heard it, and as you might imagine, the client was unhappy. Is there a system or a product that can notify us via email, text, or some other way when someone is at our front desk? Not interested in systems/products that involve constant monitoring like cameras. Just looking for a simple and inexpensive solution.
Thank you.
Edit: Bonus points, if the product has a basic communication tool built where a person can let others know that they will go to the front desk.
8 Spice ups
ZebraMike
(ZebraMike)
2
How about a locked down kiosk style computer, laptop, tablet, with some bidrectional communications program, like Skype, Teams, etc? This one is a silver bullet for what you want to do, but is for IOS only I believe. A lot of use of tablets for mundane tasks nowadays, it seems.
Could also use a cheap wireless surveillance camera with bidirectional audio, and leave that window open, and the audio will alert you to a client’s presence.
I bought a couple of these for real cheap and they have been stable, and bidrectional audio works, this is a cloud based authentication deal, and has client for Windows, Apple, Android and IOS.
1 Spice up
We use the paid iPad app called Zap-In for visitor management. It has the ability to send email alerts when someone signs in to the app. It has a newer feature that we haven’t used yet (we have a dedicated receptionist) called Lobby Chat that lets you voice, video, or text chat with your visitor. May work well for your purposes.
3 Spice ups
One of the new fancy doorbells like this: Ubiquiti Doorbell
It will ring a standard doorbell, but can also send push notifications to a phone app that someone is there. Also the added benefit of security. No need to constantly monitor this, just when the push notification happens or the bell rings.
3 Spice ups
jayya
(Jayya)
5
If you have a VoIP phone system you can usually set a sip phone up as an extension and a mobile as a fail over. We set this up on a sheltered housing project. The phone rang a couple of times if there was no answer the phone system rang a mobile / cell phone. It allowed people to walk about the building but still catch the calls
Doorbell?
The user pushes a button…and …
Regards,
Jeff Cummings
lordy
(Lordy)
7
Ok, i go for the bonus points…
Attention: DIY skills required
A push button that will Light Up a Light Bulb in the room that you are (can also use a beeper WITH the light. light is a need for the Bonus Points). Light remains ON till somebody of you go to the front desk and from there, you push another button that turn OFF the light inside the room, so that way (Light off) means that somebody is at the Front Desk
Don’t tell me its not a way!
(ROFL)
A door bell is really simple with few things that can go wrong. A PC or tablet with software etc has lots of things to go wrong.
I suggest you just test the bell every morning as you walk in.
2 Spice ups
Big_Mark
(Big_Mark)
9
My client “j-t-hutt” uses this, while it doesn’t seem to detect Jedi it’s pretty efficient 
1 Spice up
kurtm
(Kurt M.)
10
Maybe a security cam that sends email alerts when motion is detected. You wouldn’t need to monitor. I believe D-Link has some.
Send it to a group email. The person that is going to go to the front desk can send an email to the same group saying “I’ve got this”.
1 Spice up
edfishc
(EdfishC)
11
I think it would be overkill for your situation.
But I setup a single camera (1080 for under $50) and setup a Blue Iris server ($60 plus the old PC I had laying around) to monitor our front porch for deliveries.
When the scene changes a significant amount (I had to do a little tweaking so the neighbor’s cat would not set it off) I get a notification sent to my phone as a MMS containing a picture of what caused the alert with a box around it.
Blue Iris has a whole variety of options from email to text message to integration with smart lights/home control systems that can turn lights/etc on or off.
As time went on, and once my wife decided she really liked the porch camera, I have added stationary cameras to cover 360 degrees around our house, plus several PTZs…including a pair of cameras trained on the bird feeders.
I also started to use Deepstack to detect and trigger alert messages instead of standard scene changes. It is nice as it can ignore known faces, thus not sending an alert every time a family member goes in/out the door.
It is not an addiction. I don’t have a problem. I just need more. 
That is precisely the idea I am leaning towards. The only downside would be when one of us walks past it. Can it be based on a timer that only sends the message if the person is standing there for x amount of time or something like that?
Thanks for the recommendation. So with Blue Iris, can the camera run in the background and send out emails/messages when it detects someone standing there?
kurtm
(Kurt M.)
13
Options would likely vary between cameras. I know you can select a zone to monitor as opposed to anything in the cameras view. If it has the option to email a picture you would at least know if you could ignore the alert.
jim9696
(Jim9456)
14
I may be miss interpreting what happened, but this sounds like some of the projects we have proposed. A one-off kind of event happened and a complex solution is proposed to solve it. However, the proposed solution will likely just make the problem worse.
It sounds like you just fix the bell. That should be a very simple and reliable solution. Once you add a lot of complexity you just add a lot more failure modes.
Do not over-complicate simple things. A trivial QR code that can be scanned using any smartphone leads to a web page/script that triggers an email/messenger/SMS/whatever notification does the job ideally and at no cost.
