False alarms are one of the biggest nuisances for the industry as well as the police departments. Every year, the police respond to hundreds of false alarms costing the city well over thousands of dollars. providers have increasingly been taking innovative steps to curb this menace and minimize false alarms. One of the most effective steps in this direction however has been enhanced call verification, so much so that some states have mandated it. The latest state to adopt enhanced call verification as a law in Georgia.
The proponents of enhancedcall verification did not however have it easy . There was quite a bit of resistance about making verification mandatory. The opposition raised issues such as those who wanted to use verification could do it on their own without having to turn it into a law.
The issue however was that a number of companies that do not offer verification use that as a pitch for selling their services. Salesmen have been known to say things like ‘you should go with our services as the only have to make one call while the verified ones aren’t a good deal as they have to make two calls before the cops get here.’ Such pitches mislead customers into buying unverified alarm systems that continue to raise false alarms.
Enhanced call verification is one of the best things to happen to the home security industry. This can help reduce the false alarm incidents radically. What it essentially does is, every time an alarm is sounded, somebody from the monitoring station will call youback to confirm the situation, and the police will be dispatched only after confirming that it wasn’t a false alarm. This process however takes less than a minute so you don’t have to worry about losing time on verification. That is just one form of verification. Alternatively, there are mechanisms by which a monitoring agency can hear live sound bytes from the house to assess the situation. Some companies even offer video verification that enables the monitoring agency to stream video from the crime scene.
All these call verification mechanisms aim at reducing false alarms and can be greatly beneficial to the police departments as well as the end user. Ordinary Home Security Systems can easily be tipped off by pets, children or even loud sounds from outside the house. Too many instances of false alarms cause unnecessary commotion and police trips that end up in nothing. After a while, the police we simply begin to stop taking you seriously if there have been too many instances of false alarms from your house in the past. This can be extremely dangerous if you ever sound an alarm for a real reason. That is why enhanced call verification can help you avoid false alarms and keep safer if your house ever gets really intruded.
Tim Eveler
Author & Public Relations – Tim has been working in sales for the home security system industry over twelve years. He’s held positions at large home security companies and in charge of working with the team to create our security system reviews.