By Adam Prenguber, Portland Security Consultant 

How much time does your security system cost you? Whether it’s getting the car in the middle of the night to drive to your business to investigate an alarm or waiting on hold to schedule a service call, very few business owners have time to deal with all the issues that come with owning a conventional alarm system.

Here are the top five time wasters they struggle with:

1. Investigating false alarms

If you’ve used a conventional alarm, you’re familiar with the following scenario: A motion detector or door contact at your business goes into alarm. A representative from a call center at the contracted monitoring center calls you and asks if you want to have the police dispatched (you’ll likely be fined if it’s false alarm) or if you want to go and reset it yourself (putting yourself at danger or risking a loss from a real burglary). Talk about stressful! After a few false alarm fines, most businesses owners stop dispatching and start investigating, which means a lot of wasted time and some considerable personal risk.

2. Waiting on hold for service

“Please hold while we connect you to the next available representative. Your call is very important to us.” We can’t guarantee that you’ll never be put on hold, but our low operator to client ratio means you won’t be waiting long.

3. Doing a monthly walk test

Conventional systems require that you do a monthly walk test of your building to make sure your system is still working. Not only does that suck up your time, but it also means that you could potentially go four weeks without protection if your system stops working the day after your test. Sonitrol Pacific systems self-test every time they are armed.

4. Manually changing user lists

Every time you hire a new employee, change someone’s schedule, add in a holiday or promote someone, there’s another step of changing your user lists for key cards and fobs. This is not only time consuming but a big hassle.

5. Dealing with insurance companies after incidents

Filing claims, tallying inventory, waiting on hold and reviewing paperwork after a break-in can practically be as traumatic as the break-in itself. By preventing a break-in from happening in the first place, with early detection, you can save yourself the hassle of filing claim after claim. If you choose Sonitrol Pacific to be your security provider, know that we put $10,000 on the line every time you arm the system because that’s how much we’ll give you if we fail to dispatch police to a break-in.

We are all busy professionals, but I’d prefer to be busy handling the needs of my business, not the needs of my security company, wouldn’t you?