What fires when a crisis is detected
Crisis is the one thing in the console that pages people in real time. This is the whole path, end to end, so you know exactly what happens between a student typing a sentence and your phone buzzing.
How a crisis is detected
When a student writes a help message, the text is checked against a list of crisis signals (phrases that indicate danger to themselves or others). That check runs twice: once in the student app as they type, and again on our server when they submit.
The server has the final word. It can only ever upgrade a request to crisis, never downgrade one. So if a student's app missed a signal, or someone tried to mark a genuine crisis as "normal", the server still catches it and escalates.
There is a default floor of signals every tenant gets. Your institution can add its own phrases on top, and additions are only ever additive. The list is tuned to over-detect rather than miss something.
Who gets paged, and how
The moment a request is crisis priority, the student is shown immediate-support resources in the app, and your team is alerted. The alert goes out across every configured channel at the same time, not one-after-another:
- Email to the institution's crisis responders (via SendGrid).
- Slack, if your institution has configured a crisis webhook.
- SMS, via Twilio, to any crisis phone numbers your institution has set.
They fire in parallel on purpose. Email can silently stall in a queue and look sent when it never arrived, so the SMS and Slack paths do not wait on it. Any one channel succeeding is enough to reach a human.
If every channel fails for a crisis, that is the loudest alarm in the system and is escalated immediately on our side. The student still sees their request was received and is shown immediate resources regardless.
What you see in the inbox
A crisis ticket does not wait its turn. It pins to the top of the inbox regardless of how you have sorted, with a red border and the banner Possible crisis. Please respond now.
In the ticket you also see whether the student was shown the immediate-support resources and whether they acknowledged them, with timestamps. That tells you whether they have already seen the crisis lines (000, Lifeline, Beyond Blue) or whether you should lead with them.
What to do
Respond now. This is the single queue you never let sit. Acknowledge the ticket so the rest of the team can see it is being handled, then follow your institution's crisis procedure. The app has already put immediate help in front of the student; your job is the human follow-through.
The fastest answer is usually one question away.