Bates Security Adds 2024 Police Dispatch Quality Award to Growing List of Honors

The company plans to bring its data-driven approach to emergency monitoring and dispatch to Pye-Barker following its recent acquisition.
Published: August 22, 2024

LEXINGTON, Ky. — There will probably never be another month that changed the history of Bates Security more than June 2024.

First, the company earned the 2024 Police Dispatch Quality (PDQ) Award during the Electronic Security Expo (ESX) in Louisville, Ky., for excellence in reducing false alarms and maximizing the increasing limited public safety resources across the country.

“Bates Security has shown a steadfast dedication to reducing false alarms over time,” says Stan Martin, SIAC executive director, who, along with SSI account executive Dan Wilkins, presented the 2024 PDQ Award to Bates Security during ESX 2024. “They are at the forefront of the industry, embracing cutting-edge technology to minimize false alarms while enhancing customer service.”

Then, the family business that dates back four decades made the decision to join the Pye-Barker family as the latest addition to a growing conglomerate that’s building its empire largely by bringing together the best companies from across the security industry, after which it can model and expand its operations.

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“We have made a decision to double down on our passion statement, building a great company while enabling personal success,” says Jeremy Bates, president of Bates Security. “We joined an even greater company and, now, our team members have even more opportunity than they had when they were with us. We are quite excited about the future.”

Inside Bates Security’s 2024 PDQ Award Win

The PDQ Award’s reason for being is simple: to raise industrywide awareness, promote partnering with responding agencies for public safety, motivate alarm companies to take action and provide workable models. It’s sponsored by the Security Industry Alarm Coalition (SIAC), Security Sales & Integration and the IQ Certification Program.

Past winners have included companies like CPI Security, Schmidt Security, Guardian Protection, Alarm Detection Systems, EPS, Amherst Alarm, Habitec, Monitronics and Vector Security.

Bates Security — which was founded in 1984 by Sonny and Pat Bates — provides security, fire, video and access control systems, 24/7 monitoring and fire safety inspections for homes and businesses.

In addition to its headquarters location, Bates Security also has offices in Prestonsburg, Ky.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Vero Beach, Fla.; and Lake Placid, Fla. This gives Pye-Barker new customers throughout Kentucky, Florida and south Georgia. Bates has about 120 employees across its five locations.

Bates is proud of his company’s most recent accomplishment, saying it takes everyone within the business to achieve such a lofty industry perch.

“First of all, you had to have good information…good processes to talk about that make you qualified for it,” he says, noting the company applied the last two years before winning the PDQ Award this year. “I think probably some of [why we won the award] is our attention to the details.”

How Bates Is Setting Itself Apart

According to Bates, “We don’t just go out and simply sell a system, go install it and then monitor it and then just deal with problems when they come up. We try to take a more proactive approach in what we’re doing. Obviously, we sell install service and deal with problems as they come up, but our attitude is making sure you have a good product to begin with.”

Where Bates Security really sets itself apart is how they act after a system goes live. The company has a seven-day review of every security system it installs and its quality assurance manager who randomly selects two systems from each branch every month to review them from programming to activity.

“What’s exciting about her process is that, when she does find things, they become training opportunities,” says Bates.

Bates Security also uses audio and video verification of its systems to ensure they’re doing what they should do when they should do it.

“We’ve always had an attitude of verification where, if somebody’s breaking in, we can listen to it and dispatch the police and then drop very quick police response,” says Bates. “Just as importantly, if there are noises that they hear, the operator can listen and, if it’s not a true alarm, they could just simply reset it and not generate a police response.”

Bates continues, “We have had an attitude of verification and reducing false alarms. We have carried that into other aspects of our company.”

When police officers arrest a suspect off one of Bates Security’s dispatches through its Sonitrol systems, staffers go to the department’s roll call and give them a certificate of appreciation and Bates swag, recognizing them in front of their peers and supervisors.

“We try to really cultivate a good relationship with the local law enforcement,” says Bates, noting that the company is working “very, very aggressively” to reduce operator-handled events. Company leaders have told Rapid Response Monitoring Services it wants to review OHEs weekly and go after its most active accounts.

“We are actively working to try to drive down those numbers because I firmly believe that false alarms are very tied to these things,” says Bates. “If we can find an account where somebody is not disarming the system correctly or there’s something that’s causing a false alarm, these pop up in these OHE numbers.”

He continues, “We try to find the top offenders and then proactively go out there and try to work with the customer. If it’s customer-driven or maybe it’s a programming issue, we fix that. Or maybe it’s a physical issue with the system or the environment has changed.”

“That does a couple of things,” says Bates. “One, it keeps us focused on reducing those false alarms so that, when something does happen, it’s taken more seriously by the customer and the police, obviously. It also improves customer experience.”

That approach also helps with Bates employee satisfaction, he says, because team members aren’t dealing with as many irate customers calling them and wondering what’s going on with their systems.

“You have to be intentional with investing in the right people to be on your team and then investing the time to develop the processes, get them in place, improving them over time and most importantly, keep them going,” says Bates. “There is a lot of proactive work being done here and that takes all I just mentioned to make that happen…. And it’s so much better than being only reactionary.”

Bates Security also pays false alarm fines for its customers if the false alarm is triggered because of the system Bates installed or its central monitoring station.

“I think this reiterates to our team and the customer our commitment to reducing false alarms with all the work that entails,” Bates says.

Bates Security also sells its system with a full-service backbone, meaning they charge a bit more than other companies that just ask for basic monitoring fees but that extra charge covers just about everything short of acts of God or customer-caused damage.

“We have a full-service mentality, and our customers know this,” says Bates. “We have the option that, if a customer wants us to come out and inspect their system on a yearly basis, we are more than happy to do it and at no charge. It’s part of their recurring monthly fee.”

Bates Security

Photo courtesy of Bates Security

Bates Security Joining Pye-Barker

Bates doesn’t expect much to change for Bates Security as it joins Pye-Barker, other than the reach the company might have and its ability to bring its mentality and approach to the larger platform that the high-profile acquisition presents.

“Pye-Barker wants us to keep doing what we’ve been doing to make us the company that they wanted to buy,” says Bates. “We’ve been a successful company. So, that’s what attracted them to us. Those are the types of companies that they are interested in acquiring, which is what attracted us to them.”

He continues, “So, we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing. They’re not going to be forcing us to move monitoring stations or change any of what [made us successful]. They want us to keep doing what we’re doing. It’s very early on in the integration into Pye-Barker, and I do know that they are interested in [the] best ideas. How we have always grown our company is we’re interested in best practices, best ideas, good ideas that we can take and help improve our services at Bates Security.”

“I know that they have that approach, as well,” says Bates. “I bet they have ideas that can help improve the things that I just talked about. So, it’s a very open and honest relationship that they have with their dealers, such as myself and my company.”

He continues, “I think as we go on and share best practices, maybe they take some of what we’ve got, but my team will be looking for any good ideas that we can get from the greater Pye-Barker family and implementing them here to improve our customer experience and my employee experience and make us a better, well-rounded company.”

“We have always tried to aggressively do things to reduce these false alarms because it’s important to us to not waste law enforcement’s time,” says Bates. “The better we are at all this, [the more] it translates into a better customer experience. And if the customer’s having a better experience, then I think my team has a better workplace experience.”

He continues, “Law enforcement is a very valuable service, and, [in] all the communities that we live in and that we serve, it’s a finite service. It’s not limitless. So, it’s really important to take what they do for us, what they do for our communities very, very seriously and not waste their time. When we call the police, we want them to hopefully take our alarms very seriously, so they can provide whatever [the] needed services are to our customers [and] respond to the different emergencies out there.”

“All this translates into valuing the time that police and law enforcement, fire and other authorities out there that are responding to these emergencies,” says Bates. “I think it shows that we value that time. All of that translates into better customer service and a better workplace environment for my team.”

He continues, “The reason that we wanted to win the PDQ Award is it’s a validation of our approach and how we try to deliver better service for our customers.”

Trust the Process

Bates Security has built a successful and, now, award-winning formula that it expects to continue to tweak and improve.

“We try to make this part of our proven process that we publish to every single employee and that our customers see,” says Bates. “It starts from the initial site consultation all the way through proposing the system design system, then deciding to go with it and installing it.”

He continues, “We have basically a circle of life process where we’re continually doing the things that we just talked about, taking care of the customer. It’s well-implemented in what we do every day: metrics that we’re looking at, processes that we develop.”

Winning the PDQ Award only enhances the need to keep the processes intact and continue to improve them, says Bates.

“It’s an accountability measure to say, ‘We’ve been recognized for these things. We need to be doing them. Make sure that we’re still doing them,’” he says. “But when I go and check with it, we’re doing them, because that’s who we are. It’s how we’ve built the company.”

Bates continues, “There is always room for improvement, and once you build a great company, you don’t stay great. You’ve got to keep working hard to maintain a level of excellence. What we’re doing today doesn’t mean it’s going to work for us a year from now, or five years from now. We are constantly looking to improve ourselves.”

“That’s where we go and network with other alarm dealers,” he says. “We’re very excited about doing that with Pye-Barker and sharing best practices. A lot of what we do is not because we came up with it. It’s ideas that we’ve brought from other companies. We take the best and leave the rest.”

According to Bates, “Our recipe for success is really built on the tools that our partners bring to us and [those of] other dealers and other alarm companies that we network with — things that we hear that they’re doing.”

Bates Security

Photo courtesy of Bates Security

Finding the Right Partner

Bates Security made Rapid Response its central station a little more than two years ago. According to Bates, “We worked aggressively to implement all the tools that they brought to the table.”

“We made a conscious effort to make sure that we’re using the Rapid SMS texting feature where you cancel based on dispatches and communicate,” he says. “We’re making sure that we’re leveraging the reports that they can give us: their OHE report. Then, we try to leverage what each of our partners — Resideo for residential, DMP for commercial and Sonitrol — bring to the table.”

According to Bates, “It’s about keeping your eyes open, your ears open for new ideas that they bring to the table and not being afraid to leverage those things. Don’t get stuck in the way you do things.”

“Technology is certainly something that really has helped us,” he says. “Most phone calls don’t get answered, but customers can be much more responsive to texting. I know I personally am. Why would my customers be any different? Having good partners can provide you excellent tools that you make sure you leverage what’s next.”

Neil Riveron, senior account manager at Rapid Response Monitoring, says the company’s relationship with Bates started informally more than four years ago when the companies started talking about how it would look if they worked together.

”They put a lot of time into increasing their industry knowledge by participating in industry events which help expand upon best practices,” he says. “By aligning yourself with a partner that shares similar values, you can really see how that time and effort pays off.”

Morgan Hertel, vice president of technology and innovation at Rapid Response Monitoring, says Bates’ commitment to metrics helps their relationship flourish.

“Not only does it empower individuals to be major contributors in how the business succeeds or fails, but it also demands that the organization run on solid metrics,” says Hertel.

“It’s one of the reasons why Jeremy really likes what we do, because we’re such a data-driven organization. Being able to get him the data that he needs to change his business, and to be able to fall in line with that governance requirement, was really an important thing for Jeremy,” he says.

“Being able to get those metrics in front of him allowed his team to really change the way that works,” Hertel says. “Seventy [or] 75% of all the customer interactions are with the monitoring center. And whether that’s a dispatch or a false alarm, somebody needs to get service at 2 a.m.”

“Those interactions can be good, or they can really be bad,” he says. “If they’re bad, or they’re more frequent than a customer thinks that they should be, then that directly turns to customer satisfaction, to churn in the organization and turnover — both on the customer side but also the employee side.”

“Being able to give them that data that you needed be able to see which accounts are having problems, which accounts are more than chatty, which customers need service, things like that, he was able to reduce all those key metrics significantly over the first year and watched his customer service and interactions drop because he got the accounts that needed to be serviced under control had more time where service and install department and his churn change,” says Hertel.

“It’s a great partnership, because those same key metrics go both ways,” he says. “Things like how fast you get to an alarm event, how quickly you can call and get a hold of people, [and] how your notifications work. We can also see from those numbers if we’re doing a good job, or we need improvement somewhere.”

Hertel continues, “There may be times, for example, where we’re over-notifying on something because of a problem with a product or something like that, so we can now work together to say, ‘Look, let’s do something different with those particular accounts that isn’t just completely bothering the consumer. Let’s look at doing an electronic methodology and doing something a little different than we did before.’”

“Having somebody that is also paying attention to the numbers…that is also looking for ways to keep their scores up…it makes for a really good partnership between the two organizations, and Jeremy’s really good about articulating what he wants, what he needs,” he says. “And then we’re really good about saying, ‘OK, here’s the results of what that looks like.’”

Hertel concludes, “It’s been a lot of fun working with the team because their leadership model [and] their governance model really forces that relationship to be good. And because everybody’s empowered to do a good job, things don’t fall on deaf ears over there. And that’s refreshing to see.”

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