One of our goals here at All American Monitoring is to help you, our dealers, be as effective and efficient as possible. This includes ensuring your customers and their alarm systems are functioning properly, and when they’re not, making sure you and they are properly advised of the situation.
When there are issues, signals are sent to our receivers, triggering either email, text, or phone calls to be sent to your customers or you–depending on your instructions. Sometimes these signals are what we call “Excessive” or “Runaway” because there are so many signals coming in at such a rapid rate.
When our Operators get Runaway Alarms, these are the steps taken:
- The Runaway Signal is placed on a 4 hour test.
- Any troubles and/or Supervisories causing the Runaway are placed on a 4 hour test.
- You, our dealers, are called and notified of the Runaway (of course, if your phone numbers on file are not accurate or voicemails are full or the numbers have changed, it’s impossible to notify you).
- Your customers are called and notified of the Runaway signals.
- The operator places a 4 hour temp note on the account as to the outcome of the calls to you and your customers, then logs the signal as “SEE NOTES.”
Things to keep in mind–
- Excessive signals CAN and WILL create excessive charges for you, the dealer.
- Each account has an allotted amount of times based on your plan (anywhere from several hundred to about a thousand) to hit the receiver within a month before dealers get charged for the excess.
- If you’ve got questions about how those charges work and what can be done, reach out to support or billing so we can work together to find a solution.
- When our operators call, you can request for them to place the trouble signals on for a longer period of time.
- Placing troubles/signals on tests does not stop you from being charged for excessive signals.
- While placing a trouble or supervisory or even an alarm on test is a part of the runaway process, it doesn’t keep the signals from pinging the receiver. It simply keeps you and/or your customer from being overrun by emails and texts surrounding the rapid influx of trouble signals.
- The reason we notify you is so that you’re prepared for your customer to reach out to you to schedule service and/or for you to reach out to your customer.
Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that the issue with the alarm gets resolved in a timely manner to hopefully keep your costs to a minimum. Keeping you in the know about these kind of signal/service issues and the potential charges gives hopefully gives you the opportunity to drive home the importance of maintenance with your clients.
As noted above, there should be no surprises when an excessive signal is charged to you because unless you’ve created special notes on the account advising not to call you or your numbers are not working/updated/mailbox is full, you will be notified as quickly as possible with every customer.