Question:
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Dear Ken,
First, I want to thank you for sharing all of your industry knowledge with all of us in the industry! I've gotten a lot of valuable information from your newsletters! I have a situation I'm hoping you can lend some insight to. We have a customer that we had taken over in April of 2009. At the time, they were with ADT, but the customer indicated they had fulfilled their contract with them, and wanted us to take over the monitoring. The Sales Rep had obtained a cancellation letter from the customer, which he in turn sent to ADT directly. He was fairly new to the industry, and didn't follow protocol which is to have the office send the letter certified, return receipt. None the less, ADT claimed they didn't get the letter, and we didn't have proof of receipt on file. We then reissued the cancellation letter, and had given the customer a year of monitoring with us at no charge. We felt that we didn't handle the situation properly, so we took responsibility, and moved on. Since that time, the customer has called to speak to me concerning the cancellation letter, and also to tell me that one of his motion sensors had been giving off false alarms. I had indicated to him that I had written off the monitoring fees for a year (with my sincere apologies) and I would send a technician out at no charge to repair or replace the motion sensor. When I had sent out the technician, they had refused service. Since that time, I have not been able to get through to the owner of the company, as he had refused my calls. This morning I came into the office to find a letter on my desk. This letter was from his attorney! It is claiming that ADT had charged them a cancellation fee of $1,838.23, and they want to be reimbursed. This leads me to believe they did not fulfill their contract with ADT like they had said they did. I don't believe we are responsible for this, as they had indicated their contract had been fulfilled. In some cases, if the customer is close to fulfilling their contract, we will take over the monitoring at no charge until they have. This option would have been available for this customer as well. They are also claiming false alarm charges they had incurred from their local municipality in the amount of $1,300.00. We had offered to replace/repair the motion sensor at no charge, and they had refused service. Again, I don't feel we are responsible for these charges. We are a very ethical company, and pride ourselves on going above and beyond expectations for service. I'm not sure what to do in this situation. Do you have any advise? I value your knowledge, and am hoping you could lead me in the right direction with this customer.
Sincerely,
Bettie
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Answer:
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Nothing like hindsight when offering advice. Why would you send letters out to another alarm company on behalf of your potentially new subscriber? Well, don't. It's not a good practice. For one thing, why assume that responsibility? Whether you had all the facts or not, or even if the subscriber misrepresented it's relationship with the existing alarm company, now it become an issue of fact. Lucky for you the two items in contention are quantifiable, $1838.23 and $1300.00. There could have been a mix up with far greater loss.
It also sounds like you entered into a relationship with this subscriber without getting a proper contract - mine to be exact. If you had the issue of the false alarm fines would not be raised. My contracts make it crystal clear that you are not responsible for false alarm fines. So does the Disclaimer Notice, another form I suspect you didn't get signed.
You offered to fix a motion sensor. Do you have a Service Contract? I suspect not. You cannot do any service without a Service Contract. The liability exposure is too great if you don't have a proper Service Contract.
At this point, give the attorney a call and suggest that his client may be better off reinstating with ADT and that you won't provide any further service. I am assuming you don't have contracts with the subscriber. If you do then you need to read those contracts and see what you have obligated yourself to.
So my advice - if you don't have them - get the Standard Form Contracts today. Click on the blue type !!!!