The reality of false alarms in your customers' eyes

I was reading another story about shady door-to-door alarm sales practices (can you guess what company was referenced?) when I came across a quote in the Bristol Herald Courier newspaper that an alarm system customer used to describe how well his alarm worked:

"It works great. I found that out just a little while ago. I was trying to turn it off, and here comes the fire trucks, ambulance, police. It's the fastest I've even seen them move."

The problem is that this customer just caused a false alarm and rolled an ambulance, police and it sounds like more than one fire truck....just because he wasn't skilled enough to turn off his alarm. To a monitoring company or the firm who installed his system, this would be an embarassment, but here you've got a customer who's proud of his false alarm because it showed him the system worked. Until we make it clear to customers that false alarms are a huge negative, the alarm industry is going to have a major public relations problem with the law enforcement community.

-Geoff