Bay Alarm (California) Employees Speak Out

"I am a previous employee of Bay Alarm. I am posting this in order to help people stay away from this company. I was an Alarm Dispatcher for the company".

Besides the other comments on here I am going to talk about the only thing I did there, which was dispatching on alarms. You can have the most expensive alarm or the most basic, it all comes down to the monitoring center. Of course there are rules and regulations to follow but let me tell you what really happens in the monitoring center.

Bay Alarm continually under staffs the alarm center. The major reason for this is that they fire so many dispatchers they cannot hire enough to fill the spots. So dispatchers are required to pick up this slack. However someone can only do so much. They require the Dispatchers to also answer customer service calls from customers. So when you have a normal question about your system and you call the 1-800 number you are talking with the alarm dispatchers who need to be dispatching on alarms. So what happens when there are too many calls and alarms coming in? Dispatchers are forced to answer calls to maintain a very low call hold time. They are told that incoming calls have higher priority than incoming alarms. So this means during heavy incoming calls/alarms your alarm will sit there until someone is free to pick it up. An extreme example that I have seen are actual 'hold-up' or fire alarms sitting there because nobody can handle it yet. The on duty supervisors will then yell across the room to everyone to work faster. Only in certain situations will they handle the alarms personally to help out. So my point here is that you pay Bay Alarm to protect you and your household/business and due to choices made by Bay you are not even guaranteed this will happen in a timely fashion. But they have that covered in the contract you sign, they cannot be held responsible for this and many many other things that occur due to Bay's fault.

This is just one example others include when they have system failures, for example one lasted a total of two hours where zero alarms were coming into the center, and we were told to tell 'white lies' to incoming callers about the situation. Another example is during a meeting with employees the Vice President of the company saying in profanity that he doesn't care about Residential customers because he doesn't make any money off of them. He considers it a favor that he is protecting your house. This statement was witnessed by at least 30+ people unfortunately, it was a statement made by the Vice President. Please do yourself a favor and look for a different security company.

You have other people's testimony and this one to make an educated guess. Make sure the other company has both a customer service call center and an alarm dispatcher center. You have my word as a man that none of this was embellished or false, I would actually like to continue telling you why Bay is a bad choice for you, I think I am going to start a website for everyone who has a story to tell about Bay, so we can start making a difference, because believe me the number is already massive and it continually grows bigger. This company doesn't deserve to be doing business in California we deserve so much better. Thank you for reading.