It can be a slippery slope when you talk about upselling video surveillance to your existing commercial clientele. You never want to pitch security equipment or services predicated primarily on what’s best for your own company’s bottom-line profitability.
Being a trusted, professional security solutions integrator requires wearing multiple hats to varying degrees, depending on your role within the business — with everyone from the top through to the field rep on the same page. The consultative or advisory hat should always have the customer’s best interests at heart, according to the specific security solution, application and budget.
You Owe It to Your Video Surveillance Customers
As a trusted advisor, you owe it to your customers to periodically conduct an account review. This is the time to evaluate their current security solution in totality, even if your company is only responsible for a portion.
In addition to security equipment and services, take inventory of any changes to the client’s operations (e.g., business hours), environment (e.g., remodeling), footprint (e.g., new locations) or threat landscape (e.g., rising crime). At the same time, seek feedback on the customer’s comfort and satisfaction with both the solution and your company.
Armed with those insights, consider upgrades, expansions, or new technologies and services tailored to that specific client that further minimize risk exposure, enhance safety, improve general operations and deliver a compelling value proposition.
Or don’t. Perhaps, especially if it is a newer or recently updated client, their security needs are already fully met. And that’s perfectly fine. Your review and confirmation of their optimized protection is a super value-add, and the demonstrated restraint not to push something on them builds trust, long-term customer loyalty and more referrals.
If it’s appropriate to suggest or recommend a security upgrade or enhancement, it’s crucial to impress upon customers not only that your company offers all the most advanced solutions but also that your people are the foremost experts in it.
That can be effectively accomplished through the aforementioned account reviews, as well as regular customer communications (e.g., newsletters, social media, webinars, direct marketing pieces). Never underestimate multiple touchpoints and never allow a client to turn to another provider because they were unaware your company offered a given product or service.
A Changing Landscape for Video Surveillance
Nowadays, in a landscape in which video security hardware has been largely commoditized and savvy integrators are more often emphasizing recurring-revenue transactions vs. one-time sales, software and services represent increasingly robust growth opportunities.
Concerning the latter, it’s hard to beat remote video monitoring in effectiveness for the customer and profitability for the integrator. However, there are several flavors of remote video. The following are some common ones.
DIY and Self-Monitored: Doorbell and other cameras that are either not monitored or only record when triggered by motion. Minor deterrence value at best.
Video Verification: Use of video feeds triggered by traditional alarm systems or sensors to verify the validity of an alarm event to a professional monitoring center, which then alerts the alarm owner and might result in incident escalation. This reactive option can reduce false alarms but has no impact on crime prevention or apprehensions.
Event-Based Surveillance: Based on preconfigured occurrences — generated by triggers such as video analytics, AI or motion detection, or by predetermined schedules — a professional monitoring center reviews video system images to assess potential threats. These alerts require monitoring operators to assess and classify activity in the video feed. This might result in contacting the system owner and escalating to police. This can reduce false alarms and crime and raise awareness of undesirable events but has little to no impact on apprehensions.
Remote Guarding: Proactive, real-time monitoring of live video feeds intended to actively deter and respond to potential threats. Services often extend beyond reactive alarm responses, focusing on preventing incidents through active surveillance. Operators use system tools to adjust camera views, track movements and maintain a comprehensive view of monitored areas to preempt incidents. This can better reduce false alarms and have an impact on crime, but outcomes can be undermined by deploying recorded vs. live voice-downs to sites, insufficient filtering methods to eliminate nuisance alerts to remote operators, and neglected law-enforcement/response relationships.
Need to Partner
In many cases, integrators will have to partner with a properly outfitted, well-regarded third-party provider to offer these services to customers. As you go up the commercial video monitoring food chain, the shared RMR rises substantially.
Simultaneously, you can help your clients reap benefits such as eliminating false alarms, reducing or augmenting guards, remote human incident interaction in seconds and priority police response.
Scott Goldfine is marketing director with Elite Interactive Solutions, Inc. Prior to joining Elite, he served as Security Sales & Integration’s chief editor for about 25 years.
