The thing that kills security companies' reputations… and what we do instead
The Setup
For this story we’ll call these guys, “Security company ‘A’“.
These guys we’re commissioned to install Intercom and EACS products in a big refurbished apartment building here in Canberra, things started off fine, they arrived on site and began working as normal.
Fast forward a couple of months and they stopped showing up, work incomplete and the building nearing completion with the builder pushing them to finish.
The pressure was on and they finally got a response and activity from “Security Company A” but that’s when the real problems started...
Upon handover there were many things found not working, some rooms didn’t call and doors intermittently worked. Months after residents had moved in the work was still incomplete, some parts had been fixed but others totally ignored.
I was called in to have a look at fixing some of this work and boy, what a surprise…
Cables strung across walkways with not fixings (think of the Indonesian power cables in the streets but inside a building), terrible cable terminations with the copper hanging out we’ll past the terminal block daring to short on anything conductive and many more issues…
How was this even allowed to be signed off? How is this company still getting work to this day??
We’ve got a million of these stories from our own accounts seeing the bad examples or from customers who are happy to talk about why they stopped using “Security Company A” or “B” or “C”…
What we’ve seen
Most security integrators are great at showing up for the install. It's everything after, that’s where it falls apart.
→ The slow response when something breaks
→ →The job that was "almost done" three months ago
→ → → The system nobody was shown how to use
→ → → → The invoice that had stuff in it nobody agreed to
→ → → → →or worse, the security company walked off site before completion because they have “used all their quoted hours”…
We've heard these stories from almost every new client we've brought on.
Not because the industry is full of bad people (granted there are bad actors in all industries), but because most integrators treat the install as the finish line…
At CXI we treat it as the starting point.
What does that look like at CXI?
We do markups for our clients so they know where everything is going using our own in-house built tool (I’ll talk more about that in a later post)
Every job has a handover or training with the client before we leave site
Every client gets a post-install follow-up call
Every as-built and markup document belongs to the client, not us
All passwords are given to the client (we use a unique complex password for every site, kept in our password safe)
We encourage feedback so we can get better (it’s one of our core values)
We put all public documentation on our website, free for all to access and use
We are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination - we’re human too, but we promise you this: we're working hard to be the last integrator you call because your previous one let you down.
Now tell me, what's the worst post-installation experience you've seen? (Genuinely, I'm curious what's most common.)
