ADT takes Pulse across the country

BOCA RATON, Fla.—A national roll-out of ADT's new interactive services product—called 'Pulse Interactive Solutions'—began in earnest last week.

“We're rolling it out across all 350 North American offices,” said Don Boerema, ADT chief marketing officer. “We're training everyone, sales, technicians, customer care.” While this effort is certainly massive, this stage is still considered the soft launch. ADT has a “fully integrated marketing plan, which will start in the fourth quarter.”

ADT's billing it as “a new way to help manage home and family ... that's affordable, customizable and simple,” with capabilities such as: arm and disarm security systems, and receive event notifications through smart phones or computers; receive and watch secure real-time video and stored video clips of events from monitored areas of the home; lighting and appliance control; and temperature control.

Depending on the Pulse Plan, customers can access a personal web portal, a mobile application, as well as an interactive touch screen.

Boerema said Pulse is appropriate for the certain business applications as well, particularly franchise businesses. “It's perfect for business owners who want to stay in touch with multiple locations.”

Boerema described the roll out effort as a “whole ecosystem that we developed to deliver the solutions. This is where security is evolving now, we have the connected home and connected business, [with different notification options, weather information, etc,] it's pretty robust, and we have new non-traditional partners.”

The effort to put Pulse together was first talked about publicly more than a year ago, when icontrol  announced it was partnering with ADT on this [at that time unnamed project] and when ADT announced it had joined the zwave alliance.

“There's a lot of integration work that went into this, which is one reason we've taken our time,” Boerema said.

ADT's put packages together for sales and customer contact people based on extensive research the company did on customer segmentation. The packages are for certain demographics—a single person who has cats at home that they want to keep an eye on, or a working parent with school-aged kids and an elderly parent they want to keep tabs on, for example. The packages have names like Sally or Bob.

The customer care and sales people say the name/package concept is working well. They have certain questions to ask prospective customers, then pre-formatted solutions packages with relevant features they might want to consider.  “You'll hear the customer care people say 'I sold a bunch of Bobs today.'”