By Ashley Willis
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — With the goals of increasing its redundancy and reliability and creating a stronger connection with this region's dealers, C.O.P.S. Monitoring has opened its fourth central station here.
Headquartered in Williamstown, N.J., C.O.P.S. Monitoring also has 24-hour, UL-Listed central stations in Arizona, Florida and New Jersey. Executives chose the Nashville location because eight states border Tennessee, company Director of Marketing and Communications David Smith says.
"We saw a big opportunity in between our Florida and New Jersey central stations," he tells SSI. "Tennessee seemed like the right place because it borders several key states that we have dealers in. It's also very close to several other states, and we feel will make it easier for us to connect with dealers in the area. It also adds to our reliability and redundancy plan because all of our sites are hot-redundant and load-sharing."
All central stations, including two disaster recovery servers at the company's Las Vegas data center, operate on the same network. As a result, each station shares the signal traffic load for the entire operation, which helps to improve customer service and response time.
C.O.P.S., which monitors roughly 500,000 accounts for more than 3,100 dealers, transferred seven employees from the Florida and New Jersey branches to work in the new station. Operators in the Arizona and Tennessee locations are Central Station Alarm Association (CSAA) Five Diamond certified.
C.O.P.S. has also hired six additional dispatchers with plans to bring on more in the near future. All new dispatchers are required to complete 120 hours of initial training with the company's site manager, Dan Eller, Smith says. He adds that C.O.P.S. plans to expand its "hometown" presence even further and hopes to announce its next location in the near future.
Ashley Willis is associate editor for SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION. She can be reached at (310) 533-2419.
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