Are You Using Daily Activity Reports For Your Mobile Patrol? Why?

Does your security guard company have a mobile patrol division?  If you don’t, chances are you have considered it in the past or are currently thinking about it.  It has been pretty surprising and unexpected the number of companies that I have talked to over the past year and a half who now offer mobile patrols as part of their services.  To be clear, I mean mobile patrols in the “Door Puller” sense of the term.  This is a service where you have one officer driving to check on multiple client sites, several times a night, across a large geographic area.  As I talk to more of these companies, the obvious benefits of this type of service become more apparent.  What else has become apparent is that daily activity reports for mobile patrols are absolutely  useless. If you don’t agree, let me explain my reasoning.

First, let’s talk about why some security guard company customers put SO much emphasis on having their security officers submit daily activity reports.  As we all know, daily activity reports are one of the ways that your customers try to account for what your officers are doing from day-to-day.  But let’s think about that for a moment.  Is a daily activity report really proof of anything more than knowing that your security officer can write?  I can fill out a daily activity report right now and have you submit that to your customer.  Does that mean that whatever I wrote on the report is accurate or truthful?  Obviously not.  But your customers want and need some type of reassurance.

In my humble opinion, please feel free to disagree, what your customers want to know is that your officer is not sleep and is aware of what is going on at the site.  So what better way is there to show that they are awake and alert than performing verifiable patrols and submitting incident and maintenance reports instantly?  Being able to provide your customers the ability to see your officers’ patrols for themselves and be alerted immediately in the case of an incident or maintenance issue is invaluable.  That is the type of proof and transparency that your customers want.

DAR’s For Your Mobile Patrol? Stop now!

So let’s use that same logic as it pertains to mobile patrols.  For a location where a mobile officer is only on site 5 – 10 minutes, a daily activity report has absolutely no merit.  How much value does that mobile patrol customer get from a report that says “All Secure”?  Although some customers may push back against the idea of having “No proof” that the officer performed their duties, the demise of daily activity reports for mobile patrols is imminent.  Because now, by using security guard management software, your customer can get what they truly want; The ability to actually see when the officer was at the site and be informed immediately of incidents or maintenance issues. With that type of access, why would they ever want another daily activity report?

If you are still using daily activity reports for your mobile patrol would you ever consider stopping the use of DAR’s? If not, why not? Please feel free to leave your response below.

 

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By Courtney Sparkman

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