Three Reasons You Should Use Guard Touring
Keeping track of your security guards with guard tour software is becoming a standard practice among contractors, mostly because of the importance of accountability in the security industry. But, one of the main reasons security companies choose not to use a guard tour system is the cost. However, if you do a quick cost-benefit analysis, you’ll quickly realize that it generally costs more to operate a site without a guard tour system than it does with one.
Let’s look at three reasons you should be using a guard touring system. The bottom line? The benefits outweigh the costs.
1. Improved business performance
If you ask most security company executives how their business is performing, they’ll have a good idea of top-line performance. But, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that those who aren’t using guard touring don’t have visibility of more granular issues. And when those issues are left unaddressed, it can eventually lead to lost customers.
Guard tour software provides you with data that helps answer questions including:
- Are we complying with post orders or standard operating procedures?
- Which sites have the most issues?
- What are the most common types of issues?
- Which days do we have the most issues and what are they?
- Which patrol runs do we miss the most?
- Which guards are regularly underperforming?
Answering these questions allows you to identify where to focus your time to improve performance and reduce risk in your business. And, you can go back to your customers with data and evidence that you are continuously reviewing and improving your performance.
2. Reduced on-site supervision
Supervision is critical to ensure that guards are meeting the required standards outlined in your contracts. For example, are patrols being completed on time? Are vehicles being maintained? Are critical areas secured? Are officers dressed in full uniform? If you don’t invest enough in supervision, you’re increasing the risk of losing the contract because you’re not meeting your customer’s expectations.
But investing in supervision doesn’t necessarily mean you need to hire more staff. Guard touring allows you to reduce the amount of manual supervision required by using automated monitoring, workflows and alerts. A guard tour system alerts you if scheduled patrols are missed or an incident is logged. And, since you can log in from anywhere at any time, you can see if guards are on site whether you’re in the office or at another site.
Guard tour software allows you to manage more sites remotely, reducing supervisor labor costs and increasing the profit margin on your contracts.
3. Time savings through automated reporting
Customers expect to receive reports that demonstrate they’re getting the services they’ve paid for. In many cases, this involves supervisors or managers pulling together multiple data sources and manually compiling into a daily or weekly report that can result in an hour or more per week spent on reporting for each customer they service. Across 10 customers, that’s 10 hours per week of time that could be invested in more important activities.
What if there was a way to eliminate the time spent on reporting completely? That’s exactly what guard touring does. A guard tour system automatically logs all security activity for each site in real-time and packages the information into a client-friendly report that lands in their inbox on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Not only have you saved your supervisors time, but you’ve also delivered a better customer experience.
These are just some of the benefits that a modern guard tour system can deliver for your security business. Investing in a guard tour system leads to better performance, faster growth and less customer churn. Want to see how it could help you? Check out this ROI calculator to see the potential savings from using guard touring as part of your end-to-end workforce management. Want to learn more about what guard touring can do for your security business? Contact TEAM Software or Lighthouse.
TEAM Software recently acquired Lighthouse, a mobile workforce management platform for service contractors with field-based teams. Lighthouse adds time-saving capabilities that complement TEAM’s existing financial, operations and workforce management solutions to help view, manage and automate operations in the field. These capabilities include compliance tools, incident reporting, and guard touring.