Gallaher expands services and monitoring division

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—Gallaher, a regional provider of commercial life safety and asset protection solutions based here, recently announced an increased focus on customer service and an expansion to its services and monitoring division.

The company is expanding its services by offering more cloud-based solutions. This fits companies that value security, but see cost as an inhibiting factor, according to Breck Ellison, COO of Gallaher.

“We're starting the hosted services—of hosted video, managed video and access, hosted access—to allow these … smaller to mid-size [companies to] scale with their business, where they can avoid some of the heavy capital start-up costs,” Ellison told Security Systems News. App-driven technologies are also increasing in demand, he noted.

The business is entirely focused on commercial accounts, Ellison said. “To date, everything we do is commercial, government, industrial [and] healthcare.” The company has about 900 monitored accounts and more than 6,000 service accounts.

Gallaher saw 21.6 percent growth from 2015 to 2016. Gallaher accomplished this in part by “Focusing on the service side—those RMR offerings—but also just on putting … a renewed emphasis on customer service,” Ellison said.

The company could reach 50 percent growth in 2017, according to its recent announcement, and Ellison credited the same focus on customer service in the company's culture as the reason.

Gallaher is expanding its monitoring options, in part, by moving to a new wholesale monitoring center, which “offers a lot of services that our previous central station didn't, that we can pass on to our customers,” Ellison said.

New monitoring services include customer apps for control of their system and customer portals to get reports and information without going through Gallaher. “Those self-service kind of things are definitely value added.”

Gallaher is also focusing on building out its AES network, which it rebranded as Intelli-G. “Helping people get away from phone lines … and getting them onto that radio network is definitely a way we're helping our customers be code compliant,” said Ellison.

Gallaher, in business since 1973, serves the Eastern Tennessee region as well as customers in Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. The company is working to open a new branch in Nashville, Tenn.