CentraLarm: Focus on education for dealers, customer experience

MANCHESTER, N.H.—CentraLarm Monitoring, a wholesale central station based here, is taking a multi-pronged approach to improving customer service, focusing more on dealer education and hospitality.

“It's really easy to focus on the clinical or technical piece of dispatching accurately and take the humanity out of it. We've been really keeping our eyes focused on the fact that it's people talking to people on a per-call basis,” Scott Mailhot, CentraLarm VP of operations, told Security Systems News. Emphasizing hospitality means a more positive experience for alarm subscribers when they interact with CentraLarm, he explained.

Arlene Helmig, CentraLarm's founder and owner, told SSN that the company is also expanding Centra101. “We started Centra101 as an educational series, ranging from hardware and software webinars, to business growth and marketing seminars, that are delivered by experts in each category,” she said.

“Many of our dealers are unable to attend the various shows that are available throughout the year,” she said. The company has produced similar content previously, but enhanced its focus on it in January and February.

Mailhot said Centra101 means “we're partnering to arm them with information so they can better manage and grow their businesses. We're really trying to have a holistic approach where we're bettering the overall experience that any of our dealers are having with us.”

CentraLarm is also becoming more efficient, according to Mailhot. For example, the company incorporated EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) Process, an organizational model.

“[EOS Process] helped us streamline the way that we're internally communicating and organizing the company, which is making us more effective at meeting our customers' needs, prioritizing our day-to-day deliverables, and staying on top of the pieces that are going to be important for our customers,” Mailhot said.