EMERgency24 Places Urgency on Employees and Customers as Well as Signals
A sit-down with the central station’s leadership and tour of its facility makes clear the company’s commitment to prioritizing both people and technology in the mission for superior security and safety.
EMERgency24's Vice President of Operations and Administration Steve Mayer (left) and National Sales and Marketing Manager Kevin Lehan (right).
What are a couple of the toughest challenges right now for EMERgency24, specifically, but also in the monitoring industry? How are you addressing that?
Lehan: Guys can’t find technicians. That’s the biggest thing that’s killing people.
Mayer: Along the same lines, I think it’s hiring. It takes a unique person to be a monitor. To find those folks in a timely manner and get them through, they self-select out of that process, to really find those folks is challenging. With unemployment as it currently is, that adds to the challenge.
We’re looking for unique ways to have compensation models for our operators so that they can come in at a base level but have these opportunities to expand and grow from there. We have a long history here of folks who started out as operators, and they moved up, in terms of their capabilities as operators. Then they moved on to manager levels or they moved on to sales or they moved on to data entry. They’ve expanded their capabilities. It’s that starting point in finding those people who have that quality. That operator who thinks of herself as a superhero, those are the great people. But how many people, really, are going to walk in thinking that they’re a superhero?
What are the top two or three differentiators for EMERgency24 in the marketplace?
Lehan: The single most important or the most defining thing about EMERgency24 is that we have our own in-house software. We always have. We don’t have to ask outside agencies to customize anything for us. We’ve written it all in-house. We have dozens of computer engineers and software writers who work on all aspects of our enterprise system, which is what we use for monitoring.
That allows us to develop the visual point identification. It allows us to build in the two-way text capabilities. We’re working on a platform that we’ve been developing and improving since the 1970s. There is an intimate knowledge of that software. We can do a lot of things that no one else can. No one else can do the two-way SMS. The ability to have that go right into our monitoring software account, as a true notification, complies with the TMA standard they developed around ANSI’s best practices for monitoring. There’s a section that EMERgency24 pushed to have included a few years ago, which was enhanced or electronic notification. Now we’re filling that hole. Our technology capabilities, I believe, set us apart from anyone else.
Mayer: On top of the technology, it’s the people. Our technology has been tested through time and proven to endure, grow and develop, but our people have too. Our first-ever employee is still here. We have a lot of other folks here with a high degree of integrity and a high degree of customer orientation that I think is totally unique from companies I’ve been in. In this culture, we are here for our dealers. That comes from the DNA of our founder, Dante [Monteverde]. He established this as a means for supporting dealers.
That’s embedded throughout our employees. You hear it on the phone. You hear it in meetings. You hear it from people. I think it’s this reputation. One of our key employees has a high degree of interaction with the dealers. I’ve had dealers come up to me, saying, “If she ever leaves, I’m leaving.” That tightness of relationship is really, really important. The technology is core to who we are, but our people are right there next to the technology.
Lehan: One of the things that Dante insisted upon and we still do to this day, is we believe we have the most dealer-friendly contract in the industry. There is never a time or circumstance under which we lay claim to your accounts, ever. Regardless of the account condition, meaning the accounting conditions, we never have a claim to a dealer’s account. That’s his asset. We prorate any service that’s prepaid. If you want to cancel tomorrow, great. We’ll prorate the money right back. Our contract is day to day. There’s no term on our contract. Dealers can walk in any point in time because we have to earn your business every day.
Mayer: People come back. People will leave, thinking that it is a commodity service. This is not a commodity service. There’s a cost to the quality. We believe strongly in who we are and what we do. Again, this is from the DNA from Dante that he embedded into this company. We stand behind our work. Therefore, you can leave at any point in time. We do have people who have left and then come back because they understand the value of the quality.
You mentioned the video piece of things. Which specific areas do you see ramping up with the most robust growth right now?
Mayer: What I’ve heard are two pieces. One is the video verification. We know that, with a verified video, it kind of elevates the level of reaction from the authorities or response. The other is this ongoing video surveillance guard-type duty via video. I know that there’s construction sites out there that would love to have someone who can do a quick video tour to check and make sure that everything is in place. I think those two pieces on the video side will likely drive demand.
Lehan: With the video guard tour, we’re saving the end user a lot of money from having guards onsite.
Are there any vertical markets that you see particularly growing?
Lehan: I would have to say schools. More money is going into construction of schools. They’re building in alarm systems. They’re building in surveillance systems. Sadly, there’s quite a fear in the educational market about weapons events, access control, lockdown and being able to protect their students and staff. Also huge is houses of worship. My goodness, when did we start needing alarms in church or in synagogue, where we go to worship? That’s new. I don’t see that slowing down, unfortunately. Houses of worship are where our active-shooter solution is being used most often, next to schools.
Let’s talk about false alarms and alarm management for a minute. How do you see that train going right now? It seems like the industry was gangbusters for it, although we could always use more participation and more commitment from the industry, overall, but it seems like there was sort of a lull. Maybe it’s kicking up a little bit again. If you could, speak to particular measures that EMERgency24 takes to effectively manage false alarms and also the bigger industry picture.
Lehan: EMERgency24 participates with the SIAC activities in helping to implement the Model Ordinance that SIAC developed. I’m a member of the Illinois Chiefs of Police, False Alarm Reduction Committee, along with another from Johnson Controls and Father & Sons Security, here in Naperville [Ill.] Glen Mowrey and I are going to be working on another ordinance in Champagne [Ill.]. In the coming weeks, we’re going to be meeting with their chief. We’re going to have a Comcast representative with us as well. SIAC is being evermore challenged for funding, and it is such a crucial organization for the entire industry because individual alarm dealers have a difficult time affecting ordinances and whatnot.
The driver, I believe, is when you have communities that have had to cut back on policing, due to budgets. Now their guys are spread thin. They’re getting false alarms. Some of those false alarms may have come from some of the door-knocking companies that don’t have the quality installers. They’re putting up a lick-and-stick. Now we’re generating a lot of false alarms. Now that community, who had the kids dropped off at the bus to walk the streets, is inundated with a lot of false alarms. How do we curb this? The Ordinance is the best possible way, along with keeping SIAC funded.
Bringing that in-house to what you do here, what sort of best practices do you really carry out to mitigate false dispatches here?
Lehan: We offer enhanced call verification, or two-call verification. We’ll follow that to a T. I cannot force that upon a dealer. I can’t make them do that. If we try to force it upon them then I’m going to irritate a great portion of my dealers, and that’s going to be the last decision I make for this company. We have to comply, as a third party, to the wishes of our customers.
Mayer: We measure signals. We look at types of signals and have conversations with those dealers who are shown problematic accounts. But ultimately, we’re in support of their business. If they’re choosing to operate this way, we’re going to work with them. We do make recommendations though.
What does the roadmap look like for EMERgency24, if we were to look at, three to five years from now, whether it’s the impact of the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, the Cloud or what have you?
Mayer: I think the Internet of Things and DIY stuff is going to have an impact on us. It’s going to force us to rethink how and what we do. Video will grow and affect how we manage and verify video signals. It will be really critical for our customers that we have operators who can handle those signals and do a quick review of a video signal, or do the guard service we were talking about. I think a lot of the analytics, on the video side, will have a big impact on us. People will start to get more comfortable with the more direct signal from ASAP to PSAP solutions. That’ll change, again, how we operate, as a monitor, and also how others will engage with alarm systems.
As the technology evolves and accelerates in an exponential way, it’s going to dramatically change the people that we need. But that integrity, that component of awareness and customer orientation, is still going to have to be critical to excel. Despite all these changes out there, there’s still this core humans behind the technology and the humans interacting with the humans. It’s going to be, still, a critical point.
Lehan: We have had 50-plus years of incredible reputation and incredible service for our dealers. We have dealers who have been with us as long as a lot of our employees, if not longer. You asked about the three-year vision, I think there’s a 50-year vision for this company. It’s another 50 years of growing and developing.
Check out images of EMERgency24’s state-of-the-art facility in this slideshow.
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About the Author
Scott Goldfine
Scott Goldfine is the marketing director for Elite Interactive Solutions. He is the former editor-in-chief and associate publisher of Security Sales & Integration. He can be reached at [email protected].
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