Championing the customer to drive access control innovations

The global market will remain difficult for businesses throughout 2023 but a customer-centric strategy will help success, according to global security manufacturer, Gallagher. 

The company says that by championing the customer,  it will be able to innovate its way to delivering "outstanding value" to customers, despite a challenging economy. 

"As a company, we strongly believe that championing the customer will drive access control innovations," says Chief Architect of Gallagher Security, Andrew Scothern. 

"Our long-term plan is to deliver a fully cloud-based enterprise solution, and we feel its important to work closely with customers as they make the transition to an enhanced security software ecosystem," he says.

"We believe security technology players need to take the customer on the journey of product development in order to truly meet their complex access control needs," says Scothern.

"Therefore, at Gallagher Security, we'll be focused on upgrading and maintaining systems using a hybrid approach of both on-premise and cloud-based systems."

Key to Gallagher's customer-centric approach is recognising that customers want choice, which means ensuring the company never takes away the option for customers to be able to host their access control software themselves. 

In addition, Gallagher aims to provide compelling value through a series of flexible, scalable cloud-based services - for those that are comfortable taking that step.  

Along with choice, customers also want ease of deployment with a rich set of integration points, Andrew explains.  

The commitment to building rich Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and integration points ensures that customers can extend the site management software ecosystem in ways that suit the way they work, and ensures Gallagher builds a comprehensive collection of partners to meet the complex needs that customers have.  

This approach requires more work and a longer development time for Gallagher; however, the payoff is being able to offer a solution that is truly customised to customers business needs, and the ability to react quickly to adjust the Gallagher product based on their feedback. 

Thanks to its close working relationship with customers, Gallagher has been able to recognise the developing trend of access control products being used as a source of truth for information in customers wider processes and ecosystems.  

"With more focus on health and safety and knowing how building spaces are being utilised, the importance of having first-class integrations to get information in and out of the access control system is becoming increasingly important," says Scothern.

"This is another reason why our ongoing investment into our integration capabilities is so crucial to being able to evolve with our customers, design for limitless scale for growing organisations, and regularly deliver value."