Security Sales & Integration August 2021 - 35

prehensive redundancy of our six monitoring
stations and distributed staffing made us better
prepared to withstand localized situations and
outages than any other company. We also have
significant room for growth and consistently
maintain fully outfitted workstations at each
location, which gave us the ability to physically
distance employees within our sites. Perhaps
most importantly, we have ability to proactively
close more than one location if we saw the need
to without impacting service levels.
We did make changes to our disaster preparedness
plans in response to the pandemic.
As the result, our systems, procedures and employees
are now better prepared to endure circumstances
that are more widespread. Some of
the changes included procuring an inventory of
hundreds of new laptops, expanding our ability
for employees to connect securely and documented
procedures to allow employees in all
departments to work from home if necessary.
Communicating with our dealers also
evolved. COPS has a longstanding tradition of
hosting in-person training and seminars at each
of our six locations. During the pandemic, we
hosted dozens of webinars ranging on topics
such as guidance on the CARES Act, 3G upgrades,
CRM options and legacy financial planning.
Attendance for the webinars was either
the same or greater that in-person seminars.
Faced with governmental restrictions on traditional
residential sales or the reluctance from
end users having installation and service personnel
in their homes and businesses, dealers
were forced to pivot and adapt. Very early on
during the pandemic, we introduced a program
with SS&Si called " Do-it-together " where we
trained dealers how to sell DIY with the added
benefit of real-time video chat support from a
local professional alarm company.
William Niles, CEO, Brinks Home: We have
seen significant changes to where our daily
business activities take place. At the onset of
the pandemic, we equipped our operators with
laptops and significantly reduced our daily
personnel in each of our facilities. As with any
major change, working from home has brought
significant challenges, but has also provided
unique opportunities to change how things are
done. In many ways it has allowed greater business
flexibility, redundancy and responsiveness
securitysales.com
much in the way the Cloud has transformed
many IT services in recent years.
Daniel Oppenheim, CEO, Affiliated Monitoring:
In some ways, radically, and others, not
at all. For our partners' subscribers, nothing has
changed in the slightest - at no time has the
impact of the pandemic been felt by them. In
fact, our industry-leading response times improved
both during and after the pandemic!
Internally, how we do monitoring will likely
never be the same. Before COVID, we, like most
of our competitors, were 100% facilities based,
with all monitoring specialists in one of our centers.
When life suddenly changed for all of us last
year, we put our emergency plan into action. This
plan - initially designed for natural disasters -
worked flawlessly, allowing Affiliated to pivot
from 100% on-premise monitoring to almost
fully remote, with zero disruption in service.
Steve Mayer, Vice President of Operations
and Administration, EMERgency24: We leveraged
our nimble culture and technology and
learned how to work remotely for operations
and nonoperations team members. We think it
enhanced our offering for employees and even
improved our service level performance operationally.
When the UL standards are finalized,
we will layer in our standards to ensure our operations
remains highly secure, highly responsive
and highly customer oriented.
Aria Kozak, CEO, Elite Interactive Solutions:
During a pandemic it is vital that information
is transferred in real-time between a site, a command
center and law enforcement dispatch. As
a leader in crime and catastrophe detection and
prevention, our team was able to pivot our infrastructure
within our secured command center
to focus on the core of our business, monitoring
sites. Nonessential personnel to our core
have been working from home and we are able
to provide appropriate protective measures to
ensure that our command center stays safe.
As Elite's remote guarding implicitly utilizes
advanced technology and traditional
man-guarding components that enhance both
responses to and prevention of criminal activity,
our physical staffing levels of agents remain
low with added support from remote employees.
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to afAccording
to Affiliated, its
82,000-square-foot headquarters
in Union, N.J., is the
largest monitoring center in
the United States.
AUGUST 2021 Security Sales & Integration 35
Interactive
video monitoring
continues to
become a bigger
part of our
business and a
driver of
increased RMR for
partners.
- Daniel Oppenheim,
Affiliated Monitoring
http://www.securitysales.com
Security Sales & Integration August 2021

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