Dice Corporation held its users’ conference this past week, showing the various products built for the installing alarm companies, monitoring centres, and event management centers. The company released more products this year than ever before, given that the company’s design and development staff has increased. This has been driven by rapid growth, larger clients, and clients requesting additional services from Dice. Dice has been growing and expanding its role with each of its clients, while also adding new clients over the past few years.
Dice selects to work with only a few new clients each year, from the many who inquire about our products. There are over seventy different software products inside of Dice all that are designed with the same codes or language to fully function as one single system. This reduces a customer’s operating costs through efficient, unified solutions and this increases a company’s profits. Each Dice user selects the software modules that provide them with the unique solutions they need to meet their business goals. Then Dice laces these modules together providing each customers with competitive advantages that increase their market share, reduce attrition, expedite services, and increases their RMR opportunities, providing a win - win for the Dice users.
“Being a Monitoring or Event Management Company today isn’t like it was 10 years ago. You have to operate with less people now because the margins on monitoring are still shrinking and the costs of operations with servers and network technology continue to rise. When you automate your system with software that manages tasks in your centre and right out into the field, you reduce errors and increase the amount of work that can be done with your current staff” said Cliff Dice, CEO. The monitoring and event management companies that we work with have fewer employees in their corporate office and drive everything to and from remote devices, iPads, and smartphones in the field. Their people sell, install, service, and bill all from remote tools on these devices, and they have been able to get rid of costly brick and mortar buildings and the additional staff in these building that were needed to manage those operations. This dramatically changes the dynamics inside of a company, especially in relation to their accounting systems, since one single, small group can fully manage the entire operation with their fully integrated, and automated accounting software. Each Dice users’ software is designed to manage their business tasks with the software modules that they have selected. For instance, their automated solutions will manage contracts, inventory, and purchases products, even allowing their techs and service personnel to bill right from the field when the customer signs off on the tech’s handle held device.
This even allows for changes with the monitoring staff, as they can handle all inbound calls for all departments using our PBX call routing software system. It pushes calls to departments, allowing its users to program when calls must be answered, by whom, or what goes to voice mail. DICE’s intelligent voice response (IVR) can even handle low battery calls or non-critical processes, scheduling a service call to get these replaced.
Dice’s software even allows clients to serve themselves though web tools that allow them to do everything that an alarm agent would do, such as change zones, update call lists, self-schedule service calls, and the software even provides standard and customized business reports to commercial clients. This allows the centres operators to focus on their alarms and their responses. “We have customers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers operating companies with less people in them then some small alarm companies with a few thousand accounts have” said Cliff Dice. The key is automating your field agents and providing your clients with web tools and apps that allow them the freedom and flexibility to easily manage their account, while you’re tying your subscribers to your monitoring and event management company.
Changing a company from the traditional monitoring mindset to the new way of doing business, with fewer employees is not easy, especially for companies who have done things a certain way for a long period of time. They are comfortable with their style and systems. “We have heard owners say that they’d just rather sell the company then take on the changes that are required to keep up with technology, networks, and retraining their staff on a new system. They just aren’t looking at managing costs and increasing profitability. Last year we took on a company whose profit margin had eroded to the point where they were about to sell or go under. Dice changed the way the company was managed, using software tools instead of them continuing to throw managers and other software systems at the problem. We defined what was occurring in its many branches that were in the red month after month. The company was using their RMR to fund these losses, which is common practice in a traditional alarm company that services and installs. With new software tools and a new management focus, the result was that their bottom line profits came back and not just in small amounts, but in record highs that had never been seen before.”
Thirty percent of the Dice client base was in attendance at the Users Conference, with users as far away as Australia in attendance. Dice released its new Mobile Sales platform which drives all quoting, and contract imaging. This is the next generation of Mobile Sales, with our first remote sales product having been built 15 years ago.
This system basically builds the jobs to be installed while setting up the data for billing and monitoring automatically. The company released its second generation of its residential web portal system while surprising everyone with its new commercial web portal system. These two systems allow both types of clients to maintain data, while also managing their billing and payments. The key to a reduced staff is to allow your clients to manage their monitored accounts and pay their bills. Many of the other products were their Sales/CRM Software, Disaster Recovery Centre, Central Station Monitoring Software, and Service/Installation Management Software.
The DUG attendees rated this year’s conference over other year’s conferences as the best ever. Saying things like “Thank you for a very insightful experience.”
Clients came away from the conference saying “it was a great education on where the alarm industry is headed” and many said “it was the most successful users conference ever” as they got to see just how focused Dice really is on their users’ success.
