Back in the early 1970s, central station monitoring services were limited in what the professional community of the alarm industry provided to its subscribers.
Fast forward to today and alarm contractors are equipped with a dizzying array of services that they can provide to their subscribers. Given that, when an alarm contractor provides UL-listed central station alarm monitoring services to a subscriber, what does it really mean?
To start, it certainly does not mean work-from-home (WFH) monitoring, so if that is what you are providing, you need to disclose it in writing. Why? Because prospective and existing subscribers need to be able to make informed choices.
On the other hand, if you feel compelled not to disclose this “creation,” then you do so at your own peril. In other words, there is an abundance of safety, security, and reliability safeguards that you get when you have operators working with the four walls of a central station compared to operators working from home, so subscribers have a right to know.
Notwithstanding, if you are such a believer in work-from-home monitoring, then change your vernacular and offer work-from-home monitoring, not central station alarm monitoring services.
By way of example, the subscriber agrees to pay ABC Alarm Company $_______ per month, billed ____in advance for work-from-home (WFH) monitoring. If you believe that, because UL adopted work-from-home monitoring, you now have fewer duties as an alarm contractor, you would be wrong.
Setting Your Central Station Monitoring Services Apart
For transparency purposes, I was the only standard technical panel (STP) Member on UL 827, the standard for central station alarm services, who voted No. With regards to cancel/abort, once again, subscribers need to know how each part of their alarm system will operate, and the sum of how each of these parts is monitored, or are not monitored, by the central station is also crucial information that needs to be disclosed.
Otherwise, if the alarm sounds and the subscriber disarms it within the cancel abort window, knowing that the subscriber understands that the central station will not take any action or when they will is integral to the disclosure of the services that the subscriber is paying for, relying on, and how they will act.
What about log only signals and who determines what is log only and what’s not? With this in mind, a trend is that Central Stations are not taking any action on AC and low-battery trouble conditions that are reported to the supervising station.
In my opinion, this is both dangerous and unwarranted. In other words, there is no security and life safety rationale not to provide central station alarm monitoring on these trouble signals.
What about the default dispatch and notification instructions that you as the dealer have decided on? Would it be important for your subscriber to know about each of the decisions that you made for their account if it affects them or do you think that they are not entitled to know the decisions that you made? Are your procedures a one-size-fits-all approach, or should they be customized?
Against the foregoing backdrop, in the event there is a claim based upon a burglary and/or fire, serious personal injury, and/or death, and a forensic nexus is developed between what the central station did and/or did not do and as to your actions and inactions, this may put your company under a magnifying glass or it may cause a lawsuit to be filed against your company.
To that end, keeping subscribers informed of the central station monitoring services that they are getting may be the difference between liability and not having liability or it may help to minimize the risks of liability. In other words, it really depends on the fact pattern, but at the end of the day keeping a subscriber informed is the best choice.
