One of our small business clients in New England has a storefront on a quaint little street. He protects his business with one of those popular alarm services. About a year ago, he was having difficulty with the monitoring portion of his service. The alarm company uses a cell phone signal as a fail-safe for monitoring and the national telephone company that they use has poor cell phone reception in the area.
Despite the problem with the fail-safe portion of his monitoring service, our client continued to faithfully pay his bill every month. And every month the alarm company would contact him with an automated message letting him know that the monitoring service was having difficulty connecting to his system.
Just before Christmas, our client received a letter from the alarm company indicating that his rates would increase as of January 1st. Our client asked us for our opinion and what we would do in this case.
We explained that it’s a simple business matter that’s fairly simple to figure out. If the company you’re using is providing unsatisfactory service and does not offer any solutions or alternatives to ensure the product works as promised and to satisfy you as their customer, then why continue to do business with this company?
