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AG Weekly: Alarm Factors

Leif Boren
Jan 18, 2019 8:05:00 AM

 

 

Transcript:

An Alarm Factor is a metric that tells us how active an account base is by how signals it sends us. So what we do, is we take the total number of signals that are sent in a month, and divide that by the total number of accounts that the dealer has, and that gives us the alarm factor.

How Do Alarm Factors Affect Dealers?

Alarm Factors affect dealers on two different fronts. One is attrition of subscribers. If they are receiving a high number of signals in a short time period, this will often cause them to end their services earlier than if they had a service where they're receiving less calls per month.

The other thing that the alarm factor can affect dealers on is their pricing. So, if you have a very low alarm factor and you are resigning an agreement or saying a new agreement, it is easier for us to adjust pricing to meet a lower demand of operator time.

How Can I Improve My Alarm Factor Score?

So there are a few different ways to get a better alarm factor score and all of those ways really are using technology to their fullest. So, whether we're texting instead of calling on low priority signals, using an IVR, or using AG Chat for burglar alarm signals. All of those things can help reduce that alarm factor because we're not using operators to handle those signals.

Does An Alarm Factor Tell The Whole Story?

So an alarm factor is a really great metric, however, it doesn't tell the whole story because not all signals are weighted equally. For instance, a fire alarm can take several minutes longer to process than a low priority, low battery notification. So, the alarm factor does tell a lot of the story but it doesn't tell the entire story. What we look at, in addition to an alarm factor, is how much time are we spending on a signal for this dealer, or what type of signal are we calling on. All those things combined really help us to determine how much time an operator is calling on the alarms and how many signals we're getting into our central station.

What Other Metrics Are Important To Measure?

Some other metrics that are really important to track alongside an alarm factor are how many calls we're making or low priority signals or signals that can have an automatic notification, like a low battery, power loss, a supervisory signal. Those types of things where people prefer to get a text or an IVR over an operator calling them. Another thing that we can really do to diminish an alarm factor factories to use AG Chat.

Typically, in our experience, people are answering their phone about 32 percent of the time when we call. What that means, is we're calling through a call list and we're getting to the third or fourth person down the list before we're actually getting somebody to answer the phone. With AG Chat, everybody on the call gets notified immediately when the alarm goes off. Because of that, they're able to dismiss that alarm before it ever hits an operator, helping reduce the alarm factor score for that company.

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