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Panel: Businesses can learn lessons from smart home tech By Amy Canfeld FOSTER CITY, Calif.—Smart home technology can and should bleed over into the commercial market, especially for small busi- ness, according to three platform providers who spoke at the Cloud+ conference, held here. Residential customers with smart homes see the advantages of hav- ing everything connected and those that are small business owners want those same advantages at work. "Residential as a cloud testing ground for commercial," was the name of the educational session. Moderated by Security Systems News editor Martha Entwistle, speakers included Alice DeBiasio, GM, cloud services for Honeywell Security and Fire; Jay Kenny, SVP of marketing for Alarm.com; and Letha McLaren, icontrol chief mar- keting offcer. "The onboarding tools are the same for residential as for com- mercial," said DeBiasio. "It's about getting familiar, regardless of the customer you're servicing. The mes- saging may slightly change." Alarm.com's Kenny agreed. "We look at the small business market—there are almost 30 mil- lion small businesses in the U.S. They want business intelligence. I want to know my store opened on time, closed on time, high traf- fc times," Kenny said, noting that interactive technology is especially useful for multi-site management. Icontrol has training for commer- cial dealers who want to learn more By Spencer Ives SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.—Doyle Secu- rity, a full-service company based in Rochester, N.Y., started better understanding its customers by asking one question: On a scale of one to 10, "How likely is it that you would recommend Doyle Security to a friend or relative?" With that question, Doyle can calculate its Net Promoter Score, Todd Julien, company director of sales, told an audience at Honeywell CONNECT 2015. "We think it's a growth strategy for us," he said. It lets the company know where refer- rals are likely coming from. The highest raters also might be the ones to spend more on other services. Julien said that when Doyle started tracking its Net Promoter Score, or NPS, in 2011, it was in the mid-50s as a percentage out of 100. That's not bad, he said, but now the company's score is around 70 percent. Feedback from this initiative led the company to work on its "cus- tomer experience" by being more punctual on service calls and reduc- ing hold times and service backlog, Julien said. The NPS has three categories of customers, Julien said. "Promoters" are customers who respond with a nine or 10 to the question. "These are customers showing off their Total Connect app at the hockey game." They don't "attrit," he said, and this demo- graphic accounts for 80 percent of referrals. "Passives," who respond with a seven or eight, are satisfed, but not enthusiastic. This group can be dangerous, according to Julien; they could be won over by competition, and they're not likely to promote the business. "Detractors" are responsible for 80 percent of negative comments, he said, and this group would respond with a six or lower. "It doesn't take a long time to build a detractor relationship," Julien said. Companies calculate their NPS by subtracting the number of detractors from the promoters and dividing it by the total number of customers. SSN SAVE 100! Hurry! Register now! Early bird rate ends soon! FEB 2-3, 2016 DELRAY BEACH MARRIOTT, FL Attend the industry's best security technology conference. PRESENTED BY: www.techsecsolutions.com Ensuring the integrity of sophisticated systems requires vigilance in a new direction. Join Chris Peckham of Kratos, Joe Coe of Hikvision and Rodney Thayer, a security consultant, as they tackle the protection of the cyber threat. You'll see it fi rst at Techsec Cybersecurity threatens the physical security stronghold about smart services, said McLaren of icontrol. Privacy concerns are at the fore- front, she said, but business analyt- ics will be a driver. Kenny said that "there are lessons to be learned from the resi market. We're applying [those] lessons to address new market opportuni- ties." SSN Doyle lauds NPS feedback SECurITy SySTEMS nEWS January 2016 www.securitysystemsnews.com Residential systems 25