Let’s pick up on that RMR element. Tell me more about the video RMR and then I want everybody to chime in on whatever you’re doing to boost RMR.

â–  MATSON-PURTZ: On the video itself, we’re having a ton of armed robberies, home invasions, break-ins as well. It has been a very easy sale. We work very closely with the police department in Fresno. When they go out to peoples’ homes that have been broken into, or to businesses, they actually say, “You should call Matson.” That ranges anywhere from adding $40-$100 RMR depending on how many cameras they’re putting in, what type of system it is, location space. Is it interior or exterior, fenced yard, open space, that kind of thing.

We also build service into our contracts. We mostly lease systems and the monitoring and service is all built in. We hardly ever sell a system without the monitoring and service piece. That’s whether it’s cameras or burg or fire.

â–  COASSIN: I’m struggling with attaching RMR to everything. On the ride from the airport I got a text from somebody that a camera was out. I know he’s going to call the office and it’s going to take up 25 minutes of somebody’s time in customer service. They can’t fix it. We have to roll a truck. It’s something that might be out of our control, for example, IP address change. T
he kid was playing on their Xbox and reset the router. We haven’t mastered that and it’s something we really need to focus on.

The only RMR we get from our camera systems are Total Connect cameras, which do not record. They send 10-second clips so it’s more of a convenience thing. That’s how we sell them. We don’t sell them that they’re going to stream.

A lot of people in the industry are charging $5 a camera and it really tells the customer, which our sales division needs to get better at, that if you don’t pay a recurring monthly fee you will get a lower level of service. If you call in we might need to put you on hold and call you back. But if you’re paying that $5 a camera, we’re going to fix it right then and there, and we’re going to give you all the time you deserve.

â–  SHIVER-HIMES: This was our big discussion too, the DVR with four channels. We put a package together, and I told our sales team if you don’t get the monitoring for it, they can’t get the DVR. It’s a package deal, so they’re able to get this price because they’re paying $20 a month that is maintenance as well. The guys know I’m not going to sell it if I can’t get the monitoring.

â–  MATSON-PURTZ: That’s what we’ve learned on cameras, you need it [service contract]. Like you [Coassin] said, somebody changes a router or IP address, especially in commercial business, they’re always changing things. And we’re going to charge them regardless so we might as well sell the service contract with it. Then they’re paying monthly but they know they’re getting it upfront. Whereas if we charge for a service call later they’re irritated.

â–  SMITH: We’ve had the same struggles. Being from the old school, traditional, we never did charge for our camera installations, and now we have been discussing coming up with a mechanism to charge on a per-camera basis. We now have technical people that can support the cameras, the Total Connect. All day long we have people who have changed something in their network or something dropped out.

Right now, I’m providing that service but I’m not realizing any type of recurring revenue for it. One of our missions is to come up with a program to deal with that.

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One of the big changes on the intrusion side right now is dealing with the 2G cellular sunset and radio upgrades. How are you all handling that?

â–  SMITH: Part of the process of updating all the 2G radios to 4G has been charging for the update and raising the monitoring on those customers. It gives us an opportunity to go back and touch them again and get some increases. It is working out. We had a coordinator who determined the best way to contact them is a piece of mail. E-mails don’t work. We sent them a piece of mail. Get them on the call, educate them, let them know it’s a matter of time. We got 98% new agreements and then we were able to increase the recurring about 80%.

â–  SHIVER-HIMES: What about down? Did you get them for anything to do it? Like $100 to upgrade them?

â–  SMITH: We didn’t have any incentives. We charge $199 for the panel. If they had multiple, it was $179.

â–  SHIVER-HIMES: I just got an E-mail today, a 2G list of everyone we need to get out there and upgrade. I’m trying to figure out if we give the sales team a bit of something to do it or is it going straight through the service dispatcher.

â–  SMITH: First time we brought in a dedicated service technician and told him, “OK, you’re our guy. You’re going to call these customers. We’re going to incentivize you to go out there. Talk to them, go out and do it.” He could do maybe 20 in a week. When we went to also using a coordinator — and that’s all she did — we saw that number jump substantially. It was a lot smoother and we had better results.

â–  MATSON-PURTZ: I wish we could get $199. We were trying to get $99 and even then we were getting, “Let me think about it,” that kind of response. We were finding that when we called them back a week later we would be told, “AT&T can give it to me for free, so I’m going to cancel.” We quit doing that altogether and we just have our service members call our customers, schedule an appointment and we upgrade it for free. They, however, do sign a new contract.

â–  COASSIN: We had a bit of good fortune that Frontier came in and purchased AT&T in Connecticut. During that week or month, a lot of our radios started to go down. People were naturally blaming the phone companies and we naturally didn’t correct them. We would schedule the install, go out there and perform the upgrade.

I want to point out that not all customers are the same. We made three acquisitions to get started in Connecticut, and each customer group behaves differently. It all depends on that previous owner and the value he developed when he sold. There was one owner that treated everything like, “I’m your buddy, I’ll take great care of you, you’re getting a great deal.” There’s another that was very rigid and built a great value in the product. When you look at the difference, that first group of people never wants to pay while the other group sees the value.

We need to take rolling out a formal program more seriously because, from what I’m told, there might not be enough radios out there. When this happens, everyone might call us and be willing to pay $500, but I’m not going to be able to order all those.

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