Hot Seat: Full Steam Ahead at P1
Enhancing the customer experience is a major focus of yours. Talk about the technologies you want to leverage to achieve your goals.
I feel the same way about the business as I always have. This is a transaction business; we’re actually in the customer service business. At Protection One we probably have 20,000 opportunities each day to show the customer that we really care about what we’re doing – whether it’s my sales team, the installation team, the service team, billing and collection or my 24/7 group. How do you use technology to improve all that?
Take a simple thing like a residential customer asking for a technician to come out, and getting him out on the first call. The customer still wants to be able to get on with their day. It is the one call that we can accurately predict the time. So you use technology. If the tech gets there at 7:58 a.m. against an expected time of 8 a.m., the customer walks to their foyer to see if the Protection One tech is there. If the tech is there, the customer is having a pretty good day. They are going to be able to get the tech in and out of the house and be able to get on with their day.
If you get to the customer’s home at 8:02 or 8:03 in the morning, just a few minutes difference, now you’ve got a potential issue. The customer goes to the door and doesn’t see the P1 truck, you start to wonder if he’s actually going to get here today. There’s that little doubt that creeps into your mind when dealing with service providers. The customer might call into the shop by 8:05, and by 8:10 we’ve kind of lost the good mojo we could have had with that customer.
As I like to tell the techs, ‘Hey, fellahs, there is a 10- to 11-minute window that goes from the customer is thrilled that Protection One is right there when we said we were, versus it was close but we put a lot of doubt into their mind, they are starting to make alternative plans just in case, and the expectation is different.
So, how does the technician know where he has to be by 7:58? How do we know if he is going to get there at 7:58 as we move this thing forward? I think that we’ve got some good ideas in terms of the call center and what we want to be able to roll out to our customer base to allow them better access to the information and understand where that technician is at all times is one example.
I’ve had a couple of years now where I was working with the outside groups as opposed to inside an actual organization with one focus to drive the better service to the customer. So we’ve got a couple of ideas that we think we’re going to be able have good success when we get into the marketplace with them.
So technology may be great for business efficiencies and such, but the ultimate goal is still to convince the customer that you really care.
Do you think the auto attendant has been an upgrade in technology? Do you feel that extra prompts really allow you to get delivered to exactly the operator you wanted to get to? Or technology is going to help us out, right? Now you don’t even have to push the prompts, you can just get the drone to ask you, “Say that again, I did not understand you.” That’s technology, but is it helping us? It’s about focusing on the custome
r experience.
If you look at the manufacturers’ landscape, it’s changed from 20 years ago. We have a few real large manufacturers out there that have made their way into the space. Most of the large [installing security dealers] are buying from them. There are still a few new things coming out all the time. We all take a look at them to see if there’s a feature benefit we can actually bring to bear. But if you look at it, it’s not the first guy to bring the new widget to the market that is going to win in the marketplace. It is the guy who can convince the customer that you actually care about the experience they are having with you. That’s how you win in the marketplace in my opinion. That’s why I stay on the message that it is the customer service we’re selling out there. It is our ability to impact the customer’s opinion of how much we care about whatever issues they’re having that day with us.
You grew up in the industry. How has it changed and what are your thoughts on its evolution?
I like to say the digital dialer is probably the last great idea we’ve had as an industry. I do think it is kind of up in the air right now in terms of future technologies to transmit signals as the POTS lines go away. Maybe in the next five to 10 years we’ll actually see an emergence of something different. This is a pretty steady, mature industry. I think you see that with the growth – 2- to 6-percent growth on average is kind of a steady thing that plods along. The industry did real well in the recent tougher times for a lot of people. With the economy the way it’s been, our industry has held up pretty well.
I heard recently there are 13,000 or so companies in this industry and a vast majority of them are mom-and-pops. In the past 30 years there have been all these acquisitions and all this consolidation and still there are about 13,000 companies in the industry, still most of them mom-and-pops. The industry has low barriers to entry. People still want to try their hand at it. People still want to get into it. Bigger guys want to get bigger. They are going to try and consolidate where it makes sense where they see strategic fits. But it’s still not an industry where any of us has been able to break out and create brand recognition. And that is not name recognition where you know who I am, but there is an actual brand that you can feel comfortable about – ‘This is what I am going to get when I deal with them.’
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About the Author
Rodney Bosch, Senior Editor
Although Bosch’s name is quite familiar to those in the security industry, his previous experience has been in daily newspaper journalism. Prior to joining SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION in 2006, he spent 15 years with the Los Angeles Times, where he performed a wide assortment of editorial responsibilities, including feature and metro department assignments as well as content producing for latimes.com. Bosch is a graduate of California State University, Fresno with a degree in Mass Communication & Journalism. In 2007, he successfully completed the National Burglar and Fire Alarm Association’s National Training School coursework to become a Certified Level I Alarm Technician.
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