In response to the need for improved communication and situational awareness between the private security industry and public safety, the Partnership for Priority Verified Alarm Response (PPVAR) and The Monitoring Association (TMA) initiated a groundbreaking project years ago to establish an alarm-scoring standard.
PPVAR recently interviewed executives from monitoring centers and emergency communication centers (ECCs) involved in the initial pilot programs, delving into their program origins and ongoing experiences.
Coming up first we hear from a pair of ADT security industry veterans, Tom Nakatani, vice president of customer monitoring technology, and Mike Picciola, vice president of monitoring and customer care. They share insights into ADT’s first AVS-01 pilot with NETCOM 911, which deployed on Aug. 7, 2023.
The conversation then continues with a handful of other key stakeholders, including: Heather Hummel, emergency services dispatch supervisor, Fresno, Calif., Police Department; Terese Kent, public safety liaison, ADT; Morgan Hertel, vice president of technology and innovation, Rapid Response Monitoring; and, Anita C. Ostrowsk, director of central station services, Vector Security.
How did your team prepare for the implementation of the AVS-01 standard? What approaches did you use to target and effectively communicate with the ECCs?
Nakatani: ADT was deeply involved with the creation of the AVS-01 standard and has been routinely working with many AHJ’s across the country. Our preparation started very early with preparation of training materials and application changes. Through our AHJ relationships and outreach, the ADT team was able to educate ECCs and their first responders on the AVS-01 standard and get their agreement to receive the alarm level. This pilot program has been mutually beneficial in creating a feedback loop and learn how the ECCs are training their staff and adjusting their internal procedures for enhanced alarm response.
How do you facilitate the AVS-01 standard communication with the ECCs? Is it primarily through verbal or electronic means (describe path)? Additionally, please share your experiences and perspectives on the effectiveness of these communication methods in ensuring timely and accurate responses.
Nakatani: Verbally, as that was the fastest way to begin using the standard, ADT is fully committed to pioneering and driving AVS-01, and the vast majority of ECCs do not currently have capabilities to accept the information electronically. Our monitoring systems have been updated to provide alarm level scores for all of our customers and we’re prepared to send the information electronically as ECCs are trained and indicate their readiness to accept the new data.
The important part of communicating any information is making sure it’s meaningful and easy to comprehend. The AVS-01 alarm level was easily implemented as part of the protocol used between our agents and the ECC, and more importantly was actionable by the first responder.
How did your team prepare and train for the rollout of AVS-01?
Picciola: ADT used the available resources made available by PPVAR and TMA to develop a comprehensive training plan including education, scenario-based practice and agent audits to prepare for the AVS-01 Alarm Scoring rollout. The training consisted of conducting an overview of the standard’s importance, creating scenario-based knowledge checks, and completing deep dive research of each ECC notification to ensure proper communication occurred.
Our research of each ECC notification enabled us to gain valuable insights that we could share with team members and then adjust our training curriculum for other monitoring work groups. Emphasis was placed on the importance of alarm level accuracy, which enables authorities to respond with the appropriate safety measures, protecting themselves and our customers and most importantly may prioritize alarm response. Our public safety partners trust us to provide reliable and valuable information, and this is critical to adoption of the AVS-01 Alarm Scoring standard.
In implementing the AVS-01 standard, can you share the steps and strategies your monitoring center employed?
Picciola: We started off in a purely manually environment in working with a small team of operators and a small set of agencies. In implementing AVS-01, ADT’s monitoring center took steps such as routing the pilot agency alarms to a specialized team, verifying alarm levels provided in ECC notifications, and investigating each Alarm Level 2,3,4 incident by following up with responding agencies and customers.
Leaders reviewed daily all interactions for each alarm event handled. Account reviews were followed by individual meetings with team members to provide feedback, review opportunities, and gain a better understanding of decisions made while handling each alarm event. Weekly team meetings included a review of learnings from the previous week’s call reviews. We consistently utilized role plays to allow team members to practice proper communication of alarm levels and asking appropriate probing questions to gather information that ensured accuracy in the information provided to law enforcement.
What insights and lessons did your team gather that could be valuable for other monitoring centers considering or preparing for a similar rollout?
Picciola: Valuable insights for other monitoring centers include the importance of thorough training which include scenario-based situations that may be encountered, verification of communication protocols, and post-incident follow-ups to validate appropriate handling. We identified that probing questions were an important area of focus to ensure our team members gathered the necessary details to identify the correct alarm level.
We emphasized the importance of relying on fact-based information. Often customers have additional information to provide if the appropriate questions were asked. Such as: Do you have cameras you can view? What is happening in the video? Do you recognize the person in the video? Can you describe the person in the video? Are you aware of anyone being on site? Were you expecting anyone? Are you at the premises?
When communicating an alarm event to an ECC, we required a standard opening script to ensure consistency in how alarm levels were communicated with each notification.
Any other thoughts or insights that would be helpful for others who have not implemented AVS-01 yet?
Picciola: Given how clear and straightforward the standard was developed, rollout and adoption for our monitoring center was relatively easy. Adoption of the standard does not require a significant investment in technology to get started. In many cases, the monitoring center was performing similar procedures and asking the appropriate questions in normal standard operating procedures to determine the alarm score.
Operators embraced the clarity, the standard communication protocols, and confidence knowing that they are providing the right information to keep customers safe. Encourage critical thinking by asking open-ended questions to understand their alarm level reasoning. Critical thinking and problem solving is an essential skill that is becoming even more important in the role of a monitoring agent that is consistently required to analyze and evaluate information from multiple sources that may determine their next course of action.
What impacts to call center employees are you expecting with continued roll out of the standard?
Picciola: Nationwide adoption of AVS-01 will actually make the monitoring center agent’s job and overall training easier as the clarity and way in which the standard was so thoughtfully put together. It creates a common language and protocols for the delivery of information which ultimately will keep more people safe.
Heather Hummel, emergency services dispatch supervisor, Fresno PD; and, Terese Kent, public safety liaison, ADT
What are your thoughts on the AVS-01 standard?
Hummel: The initiative to provide consistent input across alarm providers via the AVS-01 standard is a missing piece that the safety community will benefit from greatly.
How do you feel the pilot program is working in your area?
Hummel: Fresno PD has gained some insight into the alarm world with ADT and the AVS-01 standard pilot program. The program has been easy to integrate and learn, allowing for the straightforward exchange of crucial information. We look forward to seeing what the future of the standard brings as it goes live with more agencies.
What process did you use to train your staff when rolling out the pilot?
Kent: In August 2023, San Diego County was the second ECC to launch the AVS-01 pilot. With 95 dispatchers, they issued the training memo provided by ADT, and included sign off sheets in their daily briefings; reporting all dispatchers were trained on AVS-01 within 4 days, unless the employee was out on leave or vacation. Taking alarms very seriously before the launch of AVS-01, San Diego County Sheriff’s now has even more situational awareness to provide enhanced response for their community.
Rapid Response Monitoring’s Morgan Hertel, vice president of technology and innovation
How did your team prepare for the implementation of the AVS-01 standard? What approaches did you use to target and effectively communicate with the ECCs?
We started the project in Q2 of 2022, defining the scope which included API needs, software development to support the scoring and ASAP to PSAP messaging and the operator training. For ECCs we have a process to help them understand when necessary, but honestly this is not complicated to explain to ECCs.
How do you facilitate the AVS-01 standard communication with the ECCs? Is it primarily through verbal or electronic means (describe path)? Additionally, please share your experiences and perspectives on the effectiveness of these communication methods in ensuring timely and accurate responses.
We started with ASAP to PSAP digital dispatch scoring first, this was very easy to implement and because it didn’t require any employee training, since then we have been layering in verbal methods as we continue to train hundreds of specialists.
Any time you can communicate the same way and use the same terminology things improve, this was the whole reason to do this standard. It’s too soon to quantify the increased efficiencies with the standardized way an alarm is called in but we are tracking all those metrics now.
When did you start implementing the AVS-01 standard, and how long has your pilot been going?
Adding AVS-01 scoring has been going on for about six months now with verbal being added a three months ago in the first team.
How did your team prepare and train for the rollout of AVS-01?
The first part is to fully understand the standard, this standard once you dig in is not too challenging to operationalize, once project managers understand the goals they can execute.
At Rapid we have a very defined roll out plan for all new initiatives, but the biggest challenge is always having development teams coordinate with training teams so that the services match when it goes into production. We did not do anything special beyond what our normal new product process.
In implementing the AVS-01 standard, can you share the steps and strategies your monitoring center employed? What insights and lessons did your team gather that could be valuable for other monitoring centers considering or preparing for a similar rollout?
In a project like this there are literally 100s of steps and goal but if you simplified it at a very high level it looks something like this:
- Define the goals and objectives with the PM Team
- Define and create the technical requirements.
- Define and create the training requirements.
- Define and create the quality control requirements
- Operationalize the application.
- Test and evaluate the software in a dev environment adjust as necessary
- Move to production, monitoring and adjust as necessary
Insights and lessons, anytime you do something of this nature you have to account for human behavior and how they understand things, but being very diligent with training and quality control checks the process gets fine-tuned. In the end paying very close to details will make a big difference in the outcome.
What benefit does your monitoring center see by using AVS-01?
The biggest one will be efficiency over time, once PSAPs get accustomed to the information and the order in which information is exchanged it should lead to time savings, in the beginning it may slow a center down a few seconds but that’s a short term problem.
This is just another way that the monitoring center brings value to the public private relationship, by delivering actionable and consistent data to the dispatch, public safety can now use this to manage their resources accordingly.
Any other thoughts that you’re willing to share?
At first this might look daunting or scary but it really isn’t, there are three centers that have started and all went through the same thing where they were prepared for a really complicated and cumbersome process but once they got into it they found it was much easier then they originally thought.
Anita C. Ostrowski, director of central station services, Vector Security
How did your team prepare for the implementation of the AVS-01 standard? What approaches did you use to target and effectively communicate with the ECCs?
We leveraged our trainers as subject matter experts after getting them up to speed on the standard. We then shared the manual chart with all our operators. We use MASterMind as our automation system and created specific actions for an operator to log history when they make the specific level.
How do you facilitate the AVS-01 standard communication with the ECCs? Is it primarily through verbal or electronic means?
We are using phone notifications on verbal calls to both PSAP and ASAP to PSAP. For ASAP to PSAP, we send an update with the ASV-01 after the request for dispatch.
When did you start implementing the AVS-01 standard, and how long has your pilot been going?
We started implementing the AVS-01 standard in August. We began by reviewing dispatches. If there wasn’t an event for the level logged, we addressed it with the individual operator. This was a new process to learn, as well as a reminder to everyone on our team of the additional step.
How did your team prepare and train for the rollout of AVS-01?
Our trainers prepared a training document, and then shared the standard with our team. The operators then used the guide to make appropriate determinations.
In implementing the AVS-01 standard, can you share the steps and strategies your monitoring center employed?
Our biggest hurdle was capturing the extra step of logging the level, as well as stating the level. Our supervisors had to continuously reinforce this need until the team was addressing this new process consistently.
What benefit does your monitoring center see by using AVS-01?
We have only been applying this standard since September and do not have enough feedback and data to report back. To date, we have not received any feedback from customers or PSAPs. We are unclear whether all PSAPs understand the message.
