PiLON is an award-winning, multi-trade contractor specialising in social housing repairs, maintenance, and education. With over 15 years of experience in the industry, they have established themselves as an innovative service provider with a technological edge.
About Company
PiLON is known in the industry to regularly exceed satisfaction targets, delivering an average of 97% across all contracts.
The driving fuel behind PiLON’s award-winning approach to technology and customer satisfaction is the core value of delivering excellence through their people.
One of the many ways PiLON strives to delight its customers is by delivering personalised customer service. This is where their Resident Liaison Officers, or RLOs, play a key role in keeping residents happy.
The nature of the job often requires their RLOs to enter people’s properties alone, without another team member or supervisor present with them.
PiLON needed a solution that can monitor their safety and give their RLOs the peace of mind that they can easily call for help if they feel threatened or are in danger.
What were their goals?
PiLON already had a number of health and safety policies in place to protect their lone workers, such as their Resident Liaison Officers.
First, they conduct a risk assessment and maintain a risk register document for all their clients to keep track of all the potential problems that could affect the visiting RLO.
Secondly, they have a policy that RLOs must never go alone to visit a client at their property for the first time. The first initial appointment is always with other people as a safety measure and risk evaluation for future visits.
Finally, they have a policy to check-in with each other through regular contact calls.
While this foundation was good, the management and PiLON realised they needed to upgrade their lone worker safety policy after one of their RLOs experienced an altercation that could have endangered her safety. To find a solution, they turned to innovative technologies.
What did they do?
After researching technology-based lone working solutions and panic alarms, PiLON’s senior management team discussed their shortlisted options.
In the end, they decided to try out Vatix’s Safe Pro lone working device because it met their most critical needs: it has a panic alarm, a man-down feature, and it connects to a cloud-based monitoring system, Protector™.
The management team contacted Vatix to get a demonstration of Safe Pro and Protector™. They fell in love with Safe Pro’s automatic data capture feature when the SOS panic button is pressed. The data captured includes audio recording and two-way audio communication, GPS location, and time stamp.
This feature was essential to PiLON because it allows the monitoring team to evaluate the emergency context, identify the location, and send the nearest help. The recording can also be valuable as court evidence if an altercation with a member of the public leads to a court investigation.
Furthermore, this automatic data capture also makes it easier for the management to create incident reports with greater speed and accuracy, without the delay of conducting interviews to figure out what happened. The audio recording also overcomes the possibi lity of conflicting stories arising from different parties.
Finally, the audio recording feature can also serve as learning material for RLOs. Evaluation of the incident can help RLOs identify what caused the incident to escalate and learn to avoid it in future.
Satisfied with what the demonstration offered, PiLON decided to invest in Vatix’s Safe Pro devices and accompanying Protector™ platform for their lone workers.
Results
The biggest impact PiLON experienced since rolling out Vatix’s lone working safety devices is the peace of mind they can give their RLOs.
PiLON has also been able to use the audio recording and data captured when an SOS button is pushed as feedback for their client. This data acts as infallible proof that a particular resident is behaving in an endangering manner so the right corrective action can take place.
“Being able to get key information about an incident at my fingertips is very valuable. It helps me because I can put a full report together based on what happened exactly rather than someone’s word because everything is fully recorded. It also helps me to create an incident report to make sure we put corrective actions in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Sid Clark
HSE Manager
