Security Sales & Integration September 2021 - 72

EXECUTIVE DECISIONS
Monitoring Matters by Mike Lamb
Benefi ts of SMS
Texting and
2-Way Chat
▶ A HANDWRITTEN LETTER received in the
Texts are
immediate
and accurate
and provide
lightning-fast
communication
to your
subscribers.
mail communicates something beyond the actual
words in the letter. It means the other person
took the time to handcraft their words, organize
their thoughts and maybe add an illustration. It's
more than the sum of its parts. A handwritten
letter is a great marketing or sales piece when
communicating with customers, but it's not the
most effi cient or expedient way to communicate
that someone's house is on fi re or that someone
may have broken into a customer's house.
More and more, people rely on and expect
immediate communication; " I want it now! " or
" I need it to be clear and concise. " Almost everything
else in your life communicates with you
through your phone. Work when you're home,
home when you're at work, the news you're interested
in, Amber alerts, weather warnings, games,
etc. Th e transition to immediate communication
has evolved beyond a luxury or novelty and into
what most people consider a minimum requirement.
Why should your alarm system, or monitoring
company be any diff erent?
In the alarm monitoring industry, this move
to immediacy from the personalized touch of a
phone call is being replaced with concise and accessible
electronic communications via SMS notifi
cations or two-way chat features. Both features
create a more effi cient mode of communication
with end users when the alarm is activated.
Th ink about this: there are plenty of times
Mike Lamb is Administration
& Compliance
Manager for UCC.
72
throughout the day when you can't take a call
but you can glance at a text, or you may not
even want to pick it up for fear it may be an
unknown caller or someone asking you about
your extended warranty. Texts are easier to read
and refer back to for information than trying to
recall a 30-second conversation with someone
several minutes or even hours after the event.
Th ere is little chance of misinterpretation as
well because there is no background noise, potential
language barriers or a bad phone connecSecurity
Sales & Integration SEPTEMBER 2021
mlamb@teamucc.com
tion; simple and clear information.
Another great benefi t of using SMS notifi cations
is that, unlike calls that are often ignored anyway,
text messages are sent in a fraction of the time it
takes to make a call. Texts are immediate and accurate
and provide lightning-fast communication
to your subscribers. If you're a business owner with
multiple locations you can see in just a glance the
name, the address, what zone and what action has
been taken when an alarm was activated at one of
your locations. You can scroll through past notifi -
cations and immediately see if it was the same zone
that went off last week or the week before.
In addition to SMS notifi cations, almost all
monitoring centers have two-way chat services.
Th is can help your subscribers communicate not
only with the monitoring center but also with other
responding parties on the call list to fi nd out
what's going on at the location and make informed
decisions about their security such as whether or
not the police department should be dispatched.
For example, when an alarm is activated at a
residence, a family can discuss, in a secure chat
room, among themselves whether the authorities
should be dispatched or whether Junior just got
home from practice and didn't put the code in
quickly enough. At a business, a group of maintenance
members or employees can discuss whether
they were expecting a delivery coming in early,
or everyone can confi rm they're not at the store
and the authorities should be dispatched.
Talk to your monitoring center and see what
sort of SMS notifi cation and two-way chat features
they are integrated with that can help improve
alarm communications with your customers. Most
SMS and two-way chat features can be customized
to fi t your company message and brand. You can
pick what types of signals to use for SMS notifi cation
and two-way chat. For example, lower priority
signals can be sent to the customer via SMS while
high priority alarms like intrusion or fi re can be
sent via two-way chat so all the important parties
can communicate with each other and freeing up
dispatcher time for real emergencies.
Similar to the personal touch of the handwritten
letter, you can personalize their service for
them, customize your message, and give them
faster response times by giving your customers the
option to take advantage of text and chat notifi -
cations. Th e innovation and convenience of these
services is in itself a modern handwritten letter
from the monitoring center to your customer.
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Security Sales & Integration September 2021

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