July 17, 2015, 3:59 PM
On today’s episode, we feature our first customer spotlight: Gregg Woodbury of G. Woodbury and Associates, a company that offers security guard and private investigation services in southeast Michigan. Gregg discusses his business’ 8-year history and how Silvertrac has changed his operations.
Early Days Of Operations
Apartment complexes in Flint and Detroit make up a big portion of Woodbury’s customers. Their system for reporting incidents in the past was not at all optimal for the situation.
“Our guards would do everything on Excel,” says Gregg. “They’d create a PDF at the end of the shift, and then they’d submit it into Dropbox so that I could view it and our clients could view it at the same time.”
There were two big problems with this system:
- Gregg couldn’t keep track of what his guards were doing in real-time. With how late reports were filed, he often wouldn’t see anything until the next day, which made guard management very difficult.
- If the property didn’t have an office for the guard to use, they would have to go home to file the report, sometimes not getting it done until the next morning after they woke up.
That led to a lack of accountability and some unpleasant conversations with customers wondering why they weren’t seeing Daily Activity Reports.
Choosing Silvertrac
As soon as Gregg saw Silvertrac's guard management software, he knew it would solve some of his problems. He was especially excited about the ability to get live updates from his guards in the field, and he laughs that they still love to tease him about tracking their activity and calling them to ask questions.
He has time to call and keep in touch with his guards now because he’s cut back so much on complaints from customers.
“The phone doesn’t ring hardly at all anymore, that’s the nice thing,” says Gregg. Customers don’t call asking what guards are doing or accusing them of misbehavior because the Checkpoint tool proves that guards are making their rounds and being where they’re supposed to be.
On the operational side, Gregg saw big improvements in vehicle tracking and getting resident’s cars in the right place using the parking management tool, and he estimated that real-time reporting and the easy-to-use applicaiton led to 40-60% time savings on patrols.
Gregg Answers FAQ’s
In the second half of the episode, we had Gregg address some questions we’ve addressed on this show in the past. For starters, we asked him whether he uses Silvertrac as an upsell or a value add. His response?
“No matter what, all of my clients get Silvertrac on their property.”
He says that trying to add that extra price on top always scares customers away, and Silvertrac just makes life easier for his officers. Plus, he says that the added efficiency and the improved retention offset the cost of the software.
Next, we asked him about using company phones versus letting employees bring their own devices.
Gregg comes firmly down on the bring your own device (BYOD) side here. He says his employees were skeptical at first, but when he reminded them that they’d have to pay the replacement cost if they damaged a company phone they got on board.
He also has found that young, tech-savy guards can be more valuable today than older, experienced guards that have never owned a smartphone. The software makes it easy to train and manage guards in the field, and you want guys that can easily use the tools to track and report incidents.
We enjoyed having Gregg on the show, and we look forward to hearing more customer success stories in future episodes.
