Brink's has own grand ole opening, central begins operations

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.--After 10 months of construction, the Brink's Home Security alarm monitoring and customer care facility center is scheduled to flip the switch for a first quarter opening. As the finishing construction touches are being made, the facility plans to launch with a staff of 75 people. Jim Hightower, managing director of customer operations at the Knoxville site, said, "This process will allow us to hire and develop great employees as well as ensure an optimal training experience, which is critical for our employee and customer experience." He estimates that the company will eventually have approximately 400 monitoring operators employed at the facility. The new central will mirror Brink's existing central station operations in Irving, Texas. The central station will launch with GE Infrastructure Security's MASterMind monitoring software, a platform the company has used for more than eight years. Knoxville has a call routing system and both sites will handle all types of customer service calls and monitoring signals. "Incoming calls and signals will be routed by availability, not by geographical location of the caller or signal," Hightower said. The data flow system will also be shared, he noted. As the two centers emulate each other in services and technology, there were key factors for choosing the Tennessee location. The central does not share the same power grid, "which provides that extra critical level of redundancy that is required in our business," he said. "We can't afford to have a site go down." The facility will also be broadband ready. According to Hightower, the network infrastructure is being finalized. Adding a second facility is a "testament to our consistent growth in the marketplace," Hightower said. Brink's serves the United States and western Canada and has mostly residential accounts, but Dave Simon, spokesman for the company, said there is a "steady upward kick in terms of growing the business" and plans to target more commercial accounts in the future. The company hit the one-million-customer mark in late 2005.