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Emergency24 gets into PERS market
Monitoring firm helps dealers offer personal emergency response systems
Photo by Geoff Kohl/SecurityInfoWatch.com
National sales manager for Emergency24, Kevin McCarthy, was on hand at the ESX 2008 tradeshow to showcase the company's offering of monitoring and fulfillment services for PERS (Personal Emergency Response Systems).
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Third-party monitoring company Emergency24 announced today at the ESX 2008 tradeshow in Nashville, Tenn., that it has entered the PERS market.
According to Branch Manager Deanna Blair and National Sales Manager Kevin McCarthy, the company is now offering services for security dealers who wish to enter the PERS (Personal Emergency Response System) market. PERS technology is similar to alarm technology in that it allows people to call or press an alert button to connect them with a monitoring station. Those monitoring services, like Emergency24 is providing, include 2-way voice to discuss with the user what they need: assistance from a family member, neighbor or friend, or an emergency medical response.
While Blair said the monitoring agents aren't medical professionals who can assess health conditions, the monitoring operators often find that the customer, which is often the elderly, have an immediate need that a monitoring operations station can help with.
However, noted Blair, "nine times out of 10, we don't have to call the paramedics."
"Often we find that they need us to call the neighbor or a family friend," said Blair.
Blair added that PERS hadn't previously been adopted as an additional service offering by dealers because "it's customer service intensive." The customers regularly want more contact from the provider, she said, noting that customers want to do their own checks very often just to make sure their PERS systems are working.
"What was happening was that dealers would start off enthusiastically [offering PERS installation services and doing the monitoring], but interest would fade when they found out how intensive the monitoring and customer service was," said Blair.
By going to a third-party monitoring provider, like what her own employer Emergency24 offers, dealers are freed away from the customer service issue. And even though they may sign on with Emergency24 for their PERS monitoring, Blair and McCarthy stressed that they're not forcing the dealer to turn over all of their accounts.
