Not many understand the huge impact inclement weather can have on the alarm industry quite like Floridians. As many of you know, when hurricane Irma wandered past our neck of the woods, we moved our team and their families in to ensure everyone was safe and that we were still up and ready to respond for our customers across the country.
What do we do to prepare for weather?
First, we have weather maps up in the Central Station to be monitored at all times. We also listen carefully to what our customers and dealers tell us, especially when we begin to notice larger volumes of outages in concentrated areas.
Next, we ensure our teams know to be on high alert and on-call for the possibility of a large influx of potential signals so we can respond quickly and appropriately. When the larger weather events are in play, this often means all-hands-on-deck so we can best support you.
When there actually is a weather threat, our upgrade to Stages helps us respond more effectively, too.
How? As mentioned above, we track the regions expecting to be impacted, we print out a list of all our dealers in that area, and keep it with our Central Station supervisors.
Why? Because when we begin to notice the larger volumes of power outages, we reach out to you, the dealers. Stages allows us to place “Mass On Test” for weather issues, and by Dealer. With your permission, we place all AC Power Failures and Low Battery alarms on test, allowing us to focus on actual alarms for the impacted areas instead of being distracted by every customer with power outages. We keep the list so that we can remove the tests as the weather improves.
We also pay close attention to what the local emergency services are telling us about the weather and their ability to respond to calls. We update our staff, you the dealers when necessary, and your customers when appropriate.
The bottom line is that we do everything we can to ensure you and your customers are taken care of no matter what, and we use all the tools at our disposal to do so. You and our customers are always the TOP PRIORITY for us.