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Affiliated Monitoring - Competitor Review

Alex Flitton
Aug 24, 2018 8:51:14 AM

Affiliated Monitoring is one of the larger wholesale monitoring providers in North America. Over the last few years, its emphasis on the PERS industry has distinguished its priorities from the security and fire industries that are monitored by most wholesale central stations.

Affiliated boasts the ability to monitor like any other central station in the industry but does not provide any specifics about its technology or service to substantiate its claims. Even if Affiliated is capable of providing top-tier monitoring, its website don’t present any unique differentiators or any details about its technology infrastructure. And while the Affiliated website doesn’t match the same outdated flavor as CenSignal, it certainly lacks substance.

Website

For the last few years, Affiliated has been putting on a PERS Industry event called Catalyst. It claims to be about sales and marketing, offering dealers a chance to hone their skills in each of those disciplines. Where the details get sticky is how well they understand the relevant sales and marketing strategies of today’s marketplace. In fact, Affiliated Monitoring only appears on the first page of Google searches for one relevant keyword in its industry beside its own name. That begs the serious question of whether or not the Affiliated team has the marketing skills it claims.

In addition, the lack of information on the Affiliated website makes the company appear to be a small, generic wholesale monitoring provider. Even if its team does have the expertise, no one could learn any details about its services, technology or people because there aren't any resources or information available on its website. 

The common theme found with the Affiliated website is its generic branding, and use of broad-themed information. The website uses a lot of buzz words like "redundant," largest, sales & marketing, and others, but don't make clear what any of those words mean. And worse yet, the site leaves people to assume the Affiliated team members know what they are talking about. For example, the site boasts the Catalyst PERS conference to be all about sales and marketing, but Affiliated only ranks for one single keyword apart from its own name in Google searches. In today's internet-based market, it is clear that they aren't capable of what they claim. 

Employment

The next serious question dealers should ask is how well their customers will be taken care of. And, while review sites are known to have polarized and inconclusive results, the problems presented are most often real. According to the employment review sites they are listed on, working there does not result well for many people. See the following employment review sites:

Indeed Reviews

GlassDoor Reviews

Kununu Reviews

Google Reviews

In the reviews, the biggest issues seem to come from operators who were disappointed with how the management structure functioned, and the lack of communication regarding expectations for the job. The real surprise comes from how many people have reviewed about their negative experiences. And, even though there are some positive reviews, they seem to be pre-canned messages published by employees from the HR department. But, reasonable doubt must be given because of the nature of central station work. It is certainly repetitive and it doesn’t leave much room for career growth. Therefore, reviews have to be taken with a certain level of skepticism.

Unique Dealer Benefits

Affiliated's biggest dealer benefit seems to come from its Catalyst PERS conference. It claims to be the largest conference for the PERS industry in the United States. In actuality, there are not many conferences that are specifically designed for PERS dealers, so making the claim to have the largest conference is misleading and altogether irrelevant. Being the biggest, and among the very few has little relevance to the value they actually provide. And like we have analyzed before, who really knows if they have the value they claim since their own digital marketing efforts aren't producing measurable results.

Another benefit Affiliated offers to dealers is its mobile application for dealers. It provides the ability for technicians to access and test accounts while on-the-go. They even have an end-user app that provides similar functions to subscribers, without the technical access. This feature, however, is offered by most monitoring centers, if not all of them. 

Services

Not much can be said about the service capabilities of Affiliated Monitoring, other than the fact that it offers services to the main alarm-based industries (PERS, security, Fire). And that is because they simply don’t communicate the information. They seem to have checked off the essential boxes like getting certified by regulation companies and even hosting its own industry conference. However, the devil is in the details, and Affiliated doesn’t like to share any.

Conclusion

Affiliated Monitoring looks good on paper, but like any misleading relationship, it is because they don’t share any details. It would be valuable for Affiliated to provide insights about its industry knowledge, unique service offerings or monitoring capabilities. And, while much can be inferred from its absence in Google search results and poor employee reviews, there simply isn’t enough information available to make a conclusive assessment about its services. 

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