Brink's Home Security: Safe Solutions

Emily Hollis - 12/1/03

Monitoring the safety of more than 800,000 homes, Irving, Texas-based Brink’s Home Security knows that learning is imperative to customer satisfaction and company success. With more than 2,600 employees in the United States and Canada, Brink’s Home Securi

With more than 800,000 customers and counting, Christina Parr, corporate manager of learning and development for Brink’s Home Security, said that much of the company’s success is built on its ability to retain existing customers. “How do you do that?” she asked. “That’s where training comes into play, in many shapes.”

Growth has changed the way Brink’s looks at its internal learning initiatives. Like most companies, Parr said, Brink’s was interested in reducing the costs of training employees, while increasing the speed to market. Other challenges the company could address through training include employee turnover and improving employee morale, which in turn improves customer satisfaction levels. To address these challenges, Brink’s implemented a learning management system from Pathlore, integrating it with portal technology from Computer Associates to provide a complete knowledge management solution.

“The portal is the platform that enables us to have multiple applications work from the same location,” said Parr. Employees go to the portal site and from there have access to company communications, department communications and the information they need as individual employees—personalized development plans, personalized transcripts, online course catalogs, learning news and human resources information, like pay and time off. “The reason that we purchased the portal was the ability to manage knowledge from multiple areas of the company,” said Parr. She added, “We needed a way to organize the volume of data that’s inherent with any large company so that everyone is really on par with the latest and greatest policies and procedures and all the latest happenings.”

The addition of the LMS has allowed Brink’s Home Security to increase its learning offerings, providing more e-learning and blended learning options to its various audiences. For example, Parr said, “marketing is an area, just like other areas, such as finance, where we have to find very specialized content that will answer their needs. That’s something we’d like to be able to answer in an e-mode, an e-learning mode. And then, of course, if we need augmentation, then we realize that they may need to go to an off-site seminar of some sort.”