HESI

Recommend that you look at better options c/o Angie's List. From the tech side, we had the usual quirks with HESI as I'd expect from a security service. The occasional blip in the system. It's really the service from this group that's at issue. VERY nice people, but the service aspect appears to be an afterthought. Leaving HESI is an expensive and painful process as well. 1) Phone calls sometimes take days to return. Have an issue with billing or a question about your account? Call between the hours of 9 and 4. Someone might be there to take your call. Otherwise hold off until the individual gets around to it. For example, my call on Tuesday was returned today (Thursday). Issue here is that this doesn't give me, as a customer, much confidence in how the security monitoring process is handled at HESI. I never had to use it...but the lax approach to business and customers made us feel very uncomfortable with our home security. 2) "Gotcha!" contracts. Pointing out here that HESI has an automatic renewal built into the contract. No notification - you simply get signed up on an automatic basis. Our three-year contract became a lifetime contract under HESI with a "...you signed this contract and it states that you need to pay a $75 cancellation fee" point when we wanted to call it quits. I was simply moving on to another company and they hit me with that "Gotcha!" tone and the renewal message. Save yourself the $75 lesson. 3) Slow Repair Service. Back again to the issue that this company seems to be extremely lax and/or understaffed. We had an electric surge hit our system - causing it to no longer monitor and to "BEEP" every night at 3AM. The process to get someone out for repairs and to reset the system has taken two weeks. No service and a wake-up BEEP...BEEP... every night. Troubleshooting was that I needed to buy a $35 battery from Radio Shack and to replace it myself. (No change) OK...wait 36 hours. (No change) OK...we will send someone out but it's going to cost you $35 per hour. Repair was scheduled two weeks after the first system shutdown and the nightly BEEPs. 4) Challenging Process to Leave Surprise from a three-year contract that is actually an automatic annual renewal contract. To leave, you will also have to send them a signed statement saying that you no longer want the service. For your protection. They certainly seem to be good at protecting their right to charge customers.

Shortly after we moved in our alarm went off for no reason for a few moments (smoke detector was triggered). Since HESI had installed the system we turned to them first. (We needed to get it set up for monitoring and figure out how the alarm worked anway.) I called them determine why the alarm had gone off, to have them show us how to use the alarm and to determine what we needed to to do have them start monitoring our home. Our representative showed up promptly that day (first visit), but the visit went south from there. The alarm book they had left for us in the house did not match the alarm box installed (so he took the book and promised to get us a new book). Since he didn't have the right booklet, he and his technician couldn't get the alarm to reset and they couldn't get the smoke detectors to work again. He promised he'd call back within a day to get his technician out here and get us a new booklet for the alarm. Four business days later, I still hadn't heard from him, so I called him. He came out this next day and this time, he forgot he needed to look at the smoke detectors, gave us an "icon" cheat sheet for the alarm instead of an actual booklet, couldn't get the alarm to work and so proceeded to take the transformer for the alarm and then disconnected it. (He couldn't get in touch with his technician this time.) He promised to have his technician call me back so we could get this figured out. That never happened. I was frustrated at thsi point, so I called the office line directly and the lady who answered the phone told me I would have to call the representative to get in touch with the technician. This wasn't looking promising in the customer service department! So, here I was after two visits with no alarm booklet (only an icon sheet), an alarm that didn't have a transformer, an alarm that was now disconnected, and smoke detectors that still didn't work! I finally gave up and called another alarm company who was out the next day. Although they wouldn't use someone else's equipment, I felt much better and safer knowing the customer service was there.

The new home I purchased had an alarm system installed by a different company that the builder no longer uses. The builder recommended HESI for monitoring service. Their sales rep. came out on time and explained all of my options for contracting with them to monitor the alarm system/fire alarm in my house. An appointment was then made for the service technician to come out to the house and get everything set up with the alarm. I wish I could remember his name because I was extremely impressed. He went up in the attic and noticed that the fire alarms in the garage were improperly wired to the rest of the system. He spent 4 hours fixing the installation to ensure the system worked properly. I have accidentally tripped the system a few times in the past year and every time their monitoring station called my home phone within minutes to say they had an alarm activation and to make sure everything was okay. At first I was a bit skeptical using a company that wasn't a national well-known company, but so far I have got my money's worth from this local company. I would definitely recommend them.