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Cutting through the noise

March 29, 2024 by Tom Clarke

Here at Reliance High-Tech we remain as busy as ever, protecting our clients’ people, assets and reputations in challenging times. We aim to keep our customers fully informed and I urge you to follow us on Linkedin. News about Reliance Protect’s lone worker solutions can be found here, while it is also on Twitter here.

The new normal – and a proven approach

Our lives have changed beyond anything we imagined even two months ago: I for one am thankful to Joe Wicks’ HIIT sessions for providing that much-needed energy burst first thing in the morning to get me ready for the day ahead working in my dining room!

Although the way we work has changed, our approach at Reliance High-Tech remains the same. We continue to provide a consultative approach that involves genuinely listening to users’ needs and providing a solution built around them that offers scalability and can evolve with changing requirements.

I fear that many organisations have wrongly dispensed with this approach – even if they ever truly adopted it – and in recent weeks have chosen to overwhelm audiences with things that are tone deaf to customers’ actual needs.

Making sense of the challenges faced

As consumers we have become used to being bombarded by sales messages in our daily lives. If you do any online shopping – and who doesn’t now?! – you will be drowning in emails, texts and social media adverts. I fear these simply overwhelm us and make buying decisions even more difficult. Research has proven there is a tipping point beyond which too much information takes all value out of the information and this makes a decision harder, not easier, as you get lost in the noise!

Too many organisations in the security industry do precisely the same by churning out increasing amounts of information about singular products and the same old services. I call institutions that adopt these methods ‘givers’, and I worry that they are simply confusing and overwhelming end users. Other organisations – let’s call them ‘tellers’ – respond to this by taking what interests them in the barrage of information and telling their audiences what they need.

Yet this also fails to help customers ‘make sense’ of what will help them understand and satisfy their needs. Being a ‘sense maker’ has always been Reliance High-Tech’s role so, in this respect, the current climate represents business as usual for us.

Changing risks demand true consultancy

What’s more, this consultative approach is perhaps more important than ever given the COVID-19 pandemic. We recognise that customers’ threat and risk profiles are changing as the disruption caused by the pandemic presents new and unique challenges.

Crime may be down by 21% but have threats to our customers gone away? Absolutely not. In fact they continue to evolve and develop each day and we understand that many organisations are still identifying new questions that they need our help in answering.

Close communication is vital at the moment. And while we used to enjoy doing this with customers face to face, we are now enjoying doing this by phone or over video conferencing. Close relationships with our customers is key, and this new way of working is perhaps making our engagement less corporate/ formal and more human, as we speak to people from our home office, kitchen, dining room or even garage. The end result is the same, however: talking to users and helping them identify solutions to their problems, sharing what we have seen elsewhere and identifying best practice.

Providing real solutions to real needs

What particular challenges does a now empty commercial building present? As risk profiles change and new threats emerge, does the solitary security officer caretaking the building still represent the best and most responsible solution to the security challenges faced?

This isn’t to argue for the wholescale replacement of people with technology, but the use of technology to complement people and provide the right overall solution. And in certain instances that will mean you don’t need a person on site to protect empty premises, or you need a solution that complements just a single security officer to ensure the site is secure, and they remain safe at a time when it matters.

At the moment, we have customers coming to us for help with many different issues, asking for a solution that meets unique needs. Whether the solution involves intrusion detection, thermal temperature screening, video analytics, touch-free access control or enhanced remote monitoring, its entirely down to how the challenge can be addressed. It’s about making sense of users’ needs at a time when it’s needed most.

Stay safe!