GC SurgeDocsNew Operator Quick Start
5 min read

New Operator Quick Start

This guide is for operators who have received a GC Surge invitation email. It covers how to activate your account, what you will see after your first login, and how to handle alarms in your first shift. Covers: Activating Your Account, Your First Login, Handling Your First Shift, Your Performance Metrics.

Who This Page Is For

You received an invitation email from your organisation’s GC Surge Super Admin. Your role is Operator — you handle live alarms during shifts using the ZenMode processing screen. You do not manage cameras, users, or platform settings — those are Super Admin tasks. This guide gets you from invitation to your first closed alarm.

Step 1 — Activate your account (~3 minutes)

  1. Open the invitation email from GC Surge and click the setup link. The link is valid for 72 hours — if it has expired, ask your Super Admin to resend the invitation.
  2. Complete the registration form: your name, phone number with country code, and a password. Password must be at least 8 characters and meet 3 of these 4 criteria: uppercase letter, lowercase letter, number, special character.
  3. Verify your phone number via the OTP sent by SMS.
  4. Successful verification logs you in directly — the Home dashboard opens automatically.

After your first login, all subsequent logins use your email and password. For a full walkthrough of the login screen, see First-Time Login.

Step 2 — What you will see after login

The left sidebar shows only the modules available to your role:

  • Home — real-time snapshot of alarm activity and site status across the operation. Review this at the start of every shift.
  • Alarm Center — your main working screen. This is where you find, claim, and enter sites during a shift.
  • Analytics — alarm trends and your personal performance data. Useful for reviewing your own results after a shift.
  • Settings — your personal account information. You can edit your display name here.

Modules you do not see (Users, Sites, Billing) are Super Admin only. If a module you expect is missing, contact your Super Admin to check your role assignment.

Step 3 — Handle your first shift

All alarm handling happens through ZenMode, the alarm processing screen. Here is the sequence for every shift:

Find a site to work on

  1. Open Alarm Center from the left sidebar.
  2. Check Queued Sites Assigned to You first — these are sites your Super Admin pre-assigned to you for this shift. If this panel is empty, move to the next step.
  3. In the Unassigned Sites table, find a site with active alarms. The table is sorted by alarm urgency — start from the top.
  4. Click the Assign to me icon (clipboard icon) to claim the site. Only sites with a green Available lock status can be claimed — blue In Progress means another operator already holds it.

Process alarms in ZenMode

  1. With a site claimed, click View ZenMode (eye icon) to open the alarm processing screen.
  2. ZenMode shows all active alarms for that site grouped into a single view. Review the alarm clips or images to determine whether each alarm is real or false.
  3. When you have reviewed the alarms, click Close and select a closure tag that describes the outcome — for example: True alarm, False alarm — animal, or Technical fault. Your Super Admin defines the available tags for your organisation.
  4. Closing the site releases it back to the queue and moves you to the next one.

For the full ZenMode interface guide including keyboard shortcuts and alarm detail views, see ZenMode — Operator Monitoring.

Your performance metrics

GC Surge tracks two metrics per operator, visible in Alarm Center and Analytics:

  • Alarm Processing Time (APT) — how fast you handle and close each alarm from the moment you take ownership of a site. Lower is better. A healthy target is under 90 seconds. Very fast closures (under 10 seconds) may indicate alarms are being closed without proper review.
  • Alarms Handled — the total number of alarms you brought to a closed state in the shift. Pairs with APT — high volume and fast time together signal efficient processing; high volume and very short time may signal bulk-closing.

You can review your own shift performance in the Alarm Center — Operator View at any time during or after your shift. See Dashboard KPI Reference for the full definition of each metric.

Tips for your first week

  • Open the Home dashboard at the start of every shift. It shows you how busy the operation is before you enter Alarm Center.
  • Claim one site at a time. Close or release a site before claiming the next one — holding multiple sites without handling them blocks other operators from picking them up.
  • Always select a closure tag. Tags are how the platform and your manager understand what is happening across sites. Closing without a tag loses that context permanently.
  • Your APT will improve naturally. The first few shifts feel slower as you learn the interface. ZenMode is designed to speed up over time as the workflow becomes familiar.
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