Sorting through all the alarm companies
When doing research on alarm companies don’t believe the first comments you read.
There are over 100 Utah Alarm Companies to pick from. Some of these are National Companies, others are local companies, some are mom and pop companies, some of the companies do not license their employees and others do. Some of them have the proper insurance and others don’t.
Understand that companies can pay to get onto certain web sites that rate alarm companies as the top ten or top five best companies. Read web comments to see if they are real or not. This is obvious when you find companies in the top ten or top five companies that have hundreds or thousands of complaints filed against them on the bbb web site. SEO companies are hired for web results and there are other companies that can be hired to place positive comments on the web and some companies offer gift cards to customers to put up positive comments.
Check the better business bureau before you buy from a company. Larger companies will obviously have more complaints than smaller companies but a disproportional amount of complaints is a red flag item.
Review the company history of each company and check on the DOPL web site (Division of Occupational Licensing in Utah) to make sure they are licensed and that the employees have been through FBI back ground checks.
Often alarm companies will hire third party companies for such services as monitoring or guard and patrol when they don’t have those services in their company so you end up dealing with two or three different companies. When they explain this up front this is fine as long as you the customer understand how the services will work, how billing will be done and who will be providing the services.
When dealing with smaller alarm companies you can have both good and some challenges because their overhead may be less although when their techs are sick or on vacation this can be a challenging time if they are busy. Larger companies have different challenges so pick your alarm companies very carefully.
Possible red flags to watch for:
Companies that have a large staff of lawyers and that are being sued in several states at once. Most large companies end up getting sued so just the fact that they are being sued is normal because wherever there is money law suits will follow although research if there is a great amount of law suits and why.
Companies that offer free equipment also may have longer contracts and high monthly fees.
Read the fine print of the contracts
Companies that have changed their name several times should also be investigated carefully so see why these name changes occurred. Some of the very successful alarm companies have gone through name changes and after you research them you may find that they are licensed and insured and they may do a fine job.