IBS improves its personal safety app

DALLAS—IBS, a central station-focused software company, has made improvements to its Safe and Secure offering, a panic button app designed to give monitoring centers an entrée into the personal protection space and more RMR.

“It's a nice addition to our existing customers that allows them to … enter into a market very, very simply,” Jens Kolind, vice president for IBS, told Security Systems News. US Monitoring started using the app in June 2015 and discussed its advantages with SSN.

In the last few months, the company has improved the onboarding process for new customers, “[Now,] there really is no interaction with the central station to get the customer onboard,” he said. The company plans to release the new version before ISC West.

Initially, users would sign up for the service online, and then have a phone conversation with an operator about contact information and payment options, Kolind said. End users now input that information themselves through the app.

“All of the things that require the central station to do something—we are trying to take care of within the app. The whole concept being that this can be applied mass market,” Kolind said. “The effort is really in marketing, and not in physical installation,” he said.

IBS added other features including, “two-way messaging between the central station and the end user, [the] ability for the end user to see exactly how the alarm is being processed and at what stage the central station is during the verification and dispatch process … [and the] ability to distribute personal safety tips,” as well as making the app easier for end users to operate, Kolind said.

Central stations can customize the offering. “Each central station has control of logos, text and type of functionality,” Kolind said. “They can customize this themselves and target very different markets as a result, allowing them to offer different types of personal safety monitoring, and charge different prices, depending on the end user's needs.”

Kolind pointed to realtors as possible customers for the app. Safe and Secure is available directly as a part of IBS' SBN automation software or as a separate cloud offering.