I was personally involved in the project. Slink may have done that before the acquisition. The only ADT customers that were not converted were customers that could not be reached, refused the serrvice, etc. ADT didn't just stop billing customers under contract. Letters were sent to all of the customer base explaining the 10 digit switch and why it was necessary. The list was generated from MAS from the active customer pool. It is quite possible that you "took over" an account that was never correctly discontinued by your new-found customer and thus never taken out of the monitoring system. The data coming over from Slink wasn't perfect by any means.
"J. Sloud" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
That is what I said. "Slink walked away from approx. 7,000 accts". I didn't say, ADT walked away from 7,000 Slink accts.
The only ADT customers that were not
How many was that? What happened to them? Are the ones that couldn't be reached still being billed? Do they think they are still being monitored?
Even though ADT couldn't monitor them? Did a termination letter go out for not complying with the terms of their contract or did they just keep receiving a bill? Might lead the customer to believe they were still being monitored.
Which was necessary to set up the initial service call, but that doesn't close the book on an account that the customer still thinks is active.
Being from the old school, I find these sort of statements funny. Programs are only as good as the people entering the data and how the information has been maintained. A computer can only tell you what it thinks is true by the information someone has fed it or left in it when the info should have been deleted. It is sort of like clean a house. The less you do of it, the more cluttered it gets. When you finally get around to cleaning, you find all those socks you thought the washer ate.
Quite possible, however, I find it a strange business policy to leave a non paying customer in an active status. I bought the account from a company that had the account for serveral years prior to me taking it over. I had it, and still do, for several years from the time I bought it. It would seem to me that if ADT would not have receive a payment on an account, for lets say seven or eight years, nor had the customer received a bill from ADT for the same period, it would lend one to believe ADT had nothing to do with that account for more years than some companies are in business. But.....thank you for reiterating my belief on how data entry and maintaining account information is most important.
Let me give another example of how the ADT account managing was handled. I have another customer that, when and only when his contract was up with ADT, changed over to our service. We changed out his equipment to modern day equipment because his house looked like some sort of old commercial application with a huge board of these old modules, etc etc etc. About a year later I got a call from the house manager about a false alarm. No alarm from central on that account. Police error? Don't know. The next week the same thing, twice in one day. No alarm from that acount at my CS. Now, there are fines from the PD. Called PD dispatch and the alarms were dispatched by ADT. Hmmmmm! Different panel, different account number. Nice data entry, nice test signals from installer on that account number, where is the data, from the new location, using an old account number go, what about dispatch to the new location, where the alarm was actually generated from, nice deletion of customer that properly canceled account. Why would a non paying account stay active for a year? If I wouldn't have found out where this was coming from, he may have had many more false alarms and fines. Lets face it, a company the size of ADT is bound to have mistakes made every day. The problem is that, these type of mistakes can have serious serious consequences. You can claim the government, international and Fortune 500 accounts all you want, and they may be handled with kid gloves to make sure you don't have a disaster, but as far as number of accounts, those type accounts make up a very small percentage of ADT's exposure. Every one here has similar stories concerning experiences from ADT customers. I am not picking on you, your comments or your employer. We all know ADT is a corner stone of the industry and drives the market. I am just more of a realist than to say everything is rosey.
That's why we just fired 200 managers and reorganized the entire company. Koch's serious about fixing the problems.
We're spending millions of dollars on a front end CRM package to help fix the customer data and sales estimation process. We've already put in place a perpetual inventory solution to enable better inventory tracking/ replenishment. We just put in place the industry's most advanced service dispatch and routing system that schedules service calls in real time based on technician availablity, customer profile, proximity, tech skill sets, etc. The entire company now uses a six sigma model for process development and problem solving.
ADT's problems stem from the mass acquisition of over 1.5 million accounts that was done too quickly and without regard to the long term consequences. It was part of the old Tyco mentaility to buy as much growth as possible. ADT was a much better company before all the aquisitions (mid-90's). That's the direction they're trying to move it now. Too bad it took them so long to realize it.
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