Diebold Inc.'s Monitoring Center in Uniontown, Ohio, has been selected as the Central Station Alarm Association (CSAA) 2011 Central Station of the Year. Diebold is the first repeat winner of the annual award, having previously won in 2007.

The Center provides a variety of alarm monitoring services for fire, life safety, access control and video surveillance for the financial industry, including comprehensive ATM monitoring. Diebold's central stations operations manager, Bob Carfolo, attributes the performance of the Center's employees as the primary reason it received the award. 

"The most critical aspect of our business involves recruiting, qualifying and retaining quality employees. Diebold employees participate in continuous training and career development to advance the quality of their work, increase employee morale and cultivate teamwork," said Bob Carfolo, central station operations manager, Diebold.

The CSAA is a trade association representing companies offering CSAA-approved monitoring services. It honors top-performing companies and professionals for attaining a distinct level of professionalism, as well as making significant contributions to the security industry.

CSAA Station of the Year Award

Applicants are judged by how well the company has adopted the criteria detailed in the application form within their central station facility. Entries are judged by a blue-ribbon judging panel that has been appointed by CSAA.

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“The quality of submissions this year was impressive,” said CSAA Executive Vice President Steve Doyle. “However, the CSAA Excellence Awards judges felt that Diebold deserved to win the top honors this year because of its outstanding incentive programs for its employees, its strong operator training and ongoing educational opportunities, its exemplary customer service outreach programs, and its recent conversion for one of its largest retail customers from dial-up alarm panel connections to IP-based technology.”

Categories subject to the judging process include certifications acquired, hiring criteria, training and continuing education programs, adoption of new technologies and involvement with industry groups, to name a few.

There are also several categories that are relationship-based. The CSAA requires thoughtful, honest responses from its Award applicants based on how the Center interacts with customers, responding authorities and the public.

According to Carfolo, finding the right people for the Center, especially in the dispatcher role, can be a lengthy process.

Recruiting, retaining the right team 

"We focus on finding individuals that are a good fit, so we use a series of assessments that are behavioral and skills-based. As stressful a position as this is, we have to be careful and get the right type of individual for the job. It's not for everyone," Carfolo said. "You never know when the next phone call is going to be from someone that has just been robbed or is being robbed."

Finding people that can handle the emotional and mental stress of a crisis situation is not an easy task, according to Carfolo.

"I've listened to phone calls that make your skin crawl when you hear the anxiety in the voice of the person on the other end. It can be scary," he said. Carfolo said that Diebold offers crisis counseling to any employee that may have been involved in a particularly intense distress call, but he noted that luckily those calls don't happen too often.

The initial training lasts up to four weeks and is reviewed every year in order to determine if any elements need to be changed or updated. The program combines classroom and on-the-job training. Once an employee is hired, there is a series of additional opportunities to expand their training, including cross-training in other departments.

"Diebold is really a learning environment, and as a corporation, we stress training at all levels. What we make available to all associates is the tools necessary to perform their jobs, but also hundreds of computer-based training courses that offer everything from how to manage your time to how to become a certified project manager," said Jacky Grimm, director of security solutions, Diebold. 

A leader-to-leader mentoring program, which is comprised of peer support teams coming together from different parts of the organization to work on projects and bounce ideas off one another was a recent addition. The program is meant to encourage a sense of camaraderie among employees who have been through the same training process.

"In a call center environment, it's not atypical to have a 25 to 30 percent turnover rate per year, but we have managed that rate down significantly during the past few years, and our tenure is really phenomenal," Grimm said. "We spend a lot of time and resources on surveying our employees to find out what they think, either directly or anonymously, so that we can continually improve the work environment."

Grimm said there are several expansion plans in place for the Center, which include more managed services, managed access control, IP video surveillance storage, and a pilot energy program that allows bank branches to manage their utilities more efficiently.

In addition to its Ohio location, Diebold operates monitoring centers in Hawaii and Mexico. Collectively, the centers provide service to sites located in the U.S., Latin America, Canada, Puerto Rico and the Pacific Islands.