When ADT combined with Protection 1 last year and Tim Whall took the helm as CEO, he challenged his now more than 18,000 employees to participate in an exciting transformation — taking this gigantic organization from a good company to a great one by providing gold-standard customer service. With a new management approach, the support of the latest in analytics and other back-end technology, and a customer-first mantra, the results 18 months in are impressive and are what led SDM to choose ADT as its 2017 Dealer of the Year.
ADT was founded in 1874 as the American District Telegraph company and is among the last companies that can still boast the word “telegraph” in its name. Despite the old-world moniker, since the beginning ADT has prided itself on technology innovation, from embracing the call box in the 1890s so that watchmen could transmit signals to a district office, to creating one of the first central stations in the 1920s, to being one of the first to embrace the smart home/Internet of Things trend with the introduction of its ADT Pulse in 2010.