Hello heroes of the traditional industry! 😎

Today we’re breaking down how security & alarm companies can automate manual tasks, tedious processes and drive operational efficiency in their businesses.

Every day someone somewhere either in their homes, office, warehouse, manufacturing facility, laboratory, storage facility, logistics center or retail shop is turning off the security alarm when opening the facility in the morning and turns it on in the evening or night when the work day is finished. Everyday there are cameras in these facilities, scans and monitoring devices to ensure maximum security and safety of these facilities.

Challenging environment 👊

Security & alarm companies are always challenged to deliver the best security services, customer support and best security equipment to meet their customers’ needs and security requirements. This industry is very dynamic and requires companies to be very adaptive, flexible, technologically advanced and also keep track of the changing regulatory landscapes.

Our world changes very fast, yet many security & alarm companies face a lot of challenges and still do much of their work in a very manual and tedious way which impacts their growth, productivity and bottom line. Use of outdated systems and inefficient work processes lead to poor customer experience, risk of errors, poor handling of customer requests and missed revenue opportunities.

How automations can help? 😉

Automations can significantly increase efficiency of security & alarm companies eliminating manual tasks, improving workflows, reducing errors and minimising time and effort required for many tasks allowing the team to focus on more important issues and make customers happy.

Here are some areas where automations can really help the company and improve the workflows.

Customer Consultation 🧐

Manually documenting customer requirements, vulnerabilities and other important information when conducting the assessment at the customer’s location. The notes often times are not structured and centralised on a platform or directory assigned to that client on the CRM or back-office platform, this leads to increased time spent on consultations which converts to increased costs and risk of errors in cost estimations. Automating this process by creating pre-defined surveys and forms will automate the requirements gathering process for the team on the field and they will also be able to attach to the surveys photos, videos or any other relevant files related to the client’s request, this will also help them team make more accurate cost estimations

Customer Interaction 📞

Many security & alarm companies still manually track client interactions and manually enter client details or requests in various systems. Implementing a CRM will help a lot with tracking customer interaction, sales, deals and upcoming revenues, one thing to consider when implementing the CRM is adapting it to your needs and building up the pipeline and workflow with predefined stages in the client interaction process. Another cool automation to implement to not enter all the client’s data manually is online forms with predefined questions sent to the customers when they have a request that requires to add and write more details and information. Each form can be sent automatically to the customers when a certain request is triggered by them.

Monitoring and support 🔎

This is an important process for security & alarm companies after designing and installing the security systems, at certain times requires maintenance works, updates or fixes. The problem is that it is hard to keep track of support requests or inquiries if you have to manually log them in and also manually notify or assign to the technician teams to make a visit to the client’s site and perform the maintenance works. A tool that can automate this process and considerably improve customer experience is a client portal integrated in your back-office platform for your team to receive the requests and the customer facing web and mobile portal which customers can use to send their inquiries to the team. A smart thing to do here is to categorise the type of requests and inquiries customers can have to automatically send notifications to the right person or department of the company.

Training 📚

Training customers on how to use the security systems or training newly onboarded team members about the company, it’s security & alarm products or equipment and security services often times takes a lot of time, the learning experience is not so structured and centralised in one place which leads to increased hours spent on preparation. Implementing a learning portal will help you streamline the learning and training process of both your team-members and clients. For clients it will be very convenient as they will know where to search and find the training materials at any time and not worry about access. For employees you can add features that will split the learning and training in categories and certain order with next learning materials and courses being available after completing the current one’s. You can also add quizzes with questions to verify the knowledge and based on the results automatically recommend your team-members to go one more time through certain learning materials in case the results weren’t positive. This will lead to the fact that your team will be better prepared to handle customer requests, interactions, do sales, execute the field works and understand the requirements better.

Compliance📋

For alarm & security companies compliance plays an important in executing their jobs, especially that they deal with a lot of variables when comes to security from handling and storing client data and information, to installation of physical devices, sensors and monitors at the client’s site that have to meet the regulatory and compliance rules. Alarm & security companies can automate this by implementing and deploying custom tools that automatically and notify about regulatory changes in real-time. The system can also create compliance checklists for the technicians to follow at different stages of the workflow with the customers.

Automations can really help security & alarm companies become more efficient, increase revenues, provide better service and experience to their customers. These were just a couple of examples were companies can improve, in our next article we will discuss other areas where security & alarm companies can streamline their processes with the help of automations.

Thank you for reading the newsletter, I’m always open to feedback or ideas for content. My goal is to make the content valuable for you and have a positive impact on what you do.🚀

Follow also on https://twitter.com/Notifiqation_