Alarm Response & Value For Money
Welcome to the second blog post in our series of posts on value for money when purchasing security services. This post is going to concentrate on the services around keyholding, mobile patrols, and alarm response and will hopefully give you an idea of what's involved in providing a professional mobile security solution.
As a business, the keyholding sub-set of services which we provide makes up about 20% of our annual turnover and is designed to solve many different problems - the most common of which is obviously having a professional attend any alarms which trigger on your premises, closely followed by mobile patrols. Other services that fall in to this category can include the daily opening and closing of business premises, or maybe service-added keyholding solutions (currently as varied as letting customers drop their vehicles off at a body shop to taking in dogs for a local council dog's home).
Like a swan in the water, there are many things beneath the surface that go in to providing an effective keyholding solution and this post will go some way in to showing more details of what goes in to the service.
A Reliable Team
As with our guarding service, our mobile response team are a reliable and trustworthy bunch, generally with at least a couple of years within the company before moving on to response duties. In addition to the vetting & screening that's required by the SIA, we also ensure that we monitor each staff member with the disclosure & barring service to ensure nothing changes with regard to their clean criminal records. As well as the core patrols, we always have a duty supervisor on call who can take on duties such as incident management (silver command), researcher, talking instruction manual, or even just a second pair of eyes through either the body-worn cameras or site CCTV to provide overwatch to our patrol guards. All of our team are employed by ourselves; there's no sub-contractors, no staff earning below the real living wage, and no gap-fills carried out using random WhatsApp groups.
A Well-Maintained Fleet
When we receive a call, the first thing that happens is a guard is deployed. We generally run two vehicles on any shift with an overlap in areas so they're able to be deployed quickly to any task. When a call comes in, we need to know that the vehicle is going to be able to reliably drive to the address and provide the service our customers expect, for this reason our vehicles are the brats of the business.. they need it? they get it! Everything from regular tyre changes and servicing to the latest technology to help us provide a more efficient service - video recording, trackers, interactive tablets loaded with encrypted assignment instructions are standard on all of our vehicles; anything it takes to allow the vehicle to perform reliably and to let our patrol guard carry out their work to a professional standard
Guard Technology
Other than actually entering a response call on to our guard management system, nearly everything is automated. We use a completely bespoke guard management system (GMS) which was developed around the business and is regularly updated to take in to account new services as we start to offer them. Once a job is "tasked" on the system, it will be sent out to the guard in that area via SMS giving them brief details on the type of job and the postcode area where the premises is located. Our bespoke software then allows the guard to send an acceptance of the task, effectively telling our GMS that they're on the way which in turn follows up by sending them further information on the tasking including a site ID, up to date codes, and details of what keys the guard will need. More precise location data including coordinates or a What 3 Words address are also sent out the guard's on board navigation. When the guard arrives on scene, they will again update the GMS which not only time-stamps the job, but reports the guard's live location.
The second piece of equipment in the guard's arsenal is the on board tablet - an encrypted device which has access to all current site assignment instructions, escalation contacts, and site maps. This allows the guard to familiarise themselves with a site very quickly and have on-hand information. Something else contained within the guard's tablets is a selection of user manuals for the most common alarm types which we come across on a daily basis.
Finally, the guard is equipped with a body-worn video camera which not only records and instantly uploads its evidence to secure cloud storage, but is capable of live streaming for remote viewing by a supervisor; our body-worn cameras act as an additional level of lone-worker safety with built in GPS tracking and distress button.
Whether it's a mobile patrol or an alarm response task, the guard will use our bespoke mobile app to evidence their visit using a combination of physical tags and GPS "virtual tags". all of which are sent back to our GMS for inclusion on reports.
Once the guard has completed their visit and is satisfied the premises are suitably secured, they will "clear down" the task on our mobile software which in turn reports to the GMS that the guard is currently clear. There are several clocks involved throughout the whole process for both logging response times and time on site, and this process will stop the final clock to ensure billing is always correct; at this point the GMS will ask the guard to fill in an incident report form including their notes, actions, and any photographs they feel would be useful - something which is provided to our client at the start of the next business day.
Key Protection
As part of the British Standard which we work to, all keys are stored within the vehicles in heavy duty safes and are secured with tamper-evident tags to the struts within the safe. Only when the patrol accepts a job are they given the details for which keys to remove and use on your premises. Our safes are not only in locked sections of our response vehicles, but they are protected by the latest alarm systems (and depending which vehicle, potentially dogs too!)
The core of our key holding
At K9 Protection, we've been in business as a guarding company since 2011 and it wasn't until about four years later that we were invited by an existing client to provide them with an alarm response solution. As with all services that we provide, we discussed the idea internally and picked it apart; we looked at what else was on the market and the range of service offerings between the big national companies and Hatchback Harry and his humble hound to see what we could bring to the game, and how we could make our service unique. The core of our service is honesty and integrity. Since the very beginning, our keyholding service has been pitted against real-world service level agreements (SLAs) where we suffer a financial penalty if for any reason we don't make the times promised; it's very easy to promise a time and then say "oops".. it's a whole different story if it's the difference between a call being profitable or not. The second thing we opted to do after much deliberation was to publish our real time response times, warts & all, and this is something we've done continually since day 1. As far as we know, there isn't another company out there that not only gives a promised time to site, but also shows how they're doing against that.. something that can sometimes be a poison chalice, as we go through times where the only site within a postcode district that's causing call-outs is half way up a single track road to the top of a mountain; or what's happened in recent months where several road closures along parts of the M4 cause a massive knock-on effect for all other roads around Newport & Cardiff - these very real situations have a direct effect on our response times and we don't hide away from this.
In Summary
We hope that taking a couple of minutes to read this has given you an insight in to what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to offering you a competitively priced professional key holding service. As with any service we supply, we'd ask any prospective customer to compare apples with apples; there's lots of different key holding providers out there and we all have a varying level of professionalism. At K9 Protection, We'd like to think that we offer a great service to customers across a variety of industries and would love the opportunity to show new clients what we do. We are a LOCAL service provider with no desire to be a national player which over the years has proven to allow for better relationship management.
If you'd like to talk about a security service, get in touch with us today.
