iMark Interactive

Installing an alarm in your home can be a great thing for peace of mind and security, but you need to do your due diligence before you go ahead with a service.  There are many options for alarm monitoring services around the country, some good and some bad.  The service that I am going to review is APX Alarm.

I am reviewing this system with personal knowledge as I am a current APX Alarm customer.  I have had their system and monitoring for about 3 years now and I can honestly say that I would rather leave my front door open than use this service again.  Their company is an absolute nightmare to deal with and they still haven’t figured out what the phrase customer service means.  So, APX Alarm, let me help you out with that….

Customer Service: Noun – assistance and other resources that a company provides to the people who buy or use its products or services

Hopefully this definition will allow your “customer service” reps to actually understand what they are there to do.  If you cannot service the customer, then stop calling it customer service.  Ok, back to the review.

APX alarm hires young people to sell their services door-to-door, usually during the summer time, all over the country.  They setup in a neighborhood and canvas the area to see if they can sell their systems.  They usually go to homes that don’t have an alarm sign, but have neighbors that have alarms.  This enables them to use a simple scare tactic in order to push for the sale.  The real issue that you need to be aware of is that most of the sales reps do not follow the requirements setup by the company.  They are in a cut-throat environment trying to survive, so they resort to lying.

Once the sales reps scare you into a sale, they start the contract signing part of the deal.  The main issue is that they rush you into signing without giving you ample time to read the contract.  They negate to discuss contract cancellation fees or monthly fees.  When asked directly, they tend to tell you that there is no fee for cancellation.  This is a flat out lie as it costs you the rest of the contract to get out.  They also don’t let you know that you have 3 days after the contract is signed to cancel.  This is a law in most states, but without knowing it, people are unable to use it.  It is similar to buyers remorse laws in some states with car dealers.  The sales people at APX Alarm resort to bait and switch in order to get contracts.  This tactic is illegal, but APX has paid states a lot of money in order to change the color of their paper and ink so you are unable to read the writing in most situations.

After you sign the contract, they call their office and they have you verbally agree to the contract.  They usually do not tell you that you have to sign up for auto debit in order to get the deal, but if you push, you can still get the deal while still paying with a check.  I never allow companies to auto debit my account because they often tend to double dip into your account and then call it a software glitch.  After the phone call, they call the installer and in about 2 minutes they come flying up and jumping out of a van to install the system.  It is like a bunch of clowns in a circus car.  They say that it doesn’t take long to install the system, but it will take a couple of hours.  I cannot say that all the technicians are slow, but the ones doing the installs around my area were untrained and unprofessional.  When they pull out the system, make sure you check it out.  I almost laughed when they installed our system because the it was so archaic and bulky.  Below is the wireless system that is installed in most homes, but not all.

If you look at the picture, I decided to put up the same computer that I wrote this post with.  It is my Asus netbook on top.  The alarm system is the exact same size in width, but bigger in depth.  It makes me laugh to think that I have a portable computer that is the same size as my alarm system.  To think about, it makes me a little sad that the alarm system is that big.

This review is to make sure that you do not fall for the scare and push tactics that APX Alarm sales people use.  They have duped many people in different states into outrageous contracts that are so iron-clad that most lawyers don’t even know how to get around them.  I have personal experience with three other large, national alarm monitoring companies and APX Alarm is by far the worst that I have ever encountered.   I have spoken with over 100 other people that have APX alarm and about 3 out of 4 dislike their service or the company itself.  All of them were brought into a contract with the same scare tactics, which is a staggering number.

Stay away from APX Alarm and take your time researching a company that you are interested in. Don’t bother taking your issues to the Better Business Bureau because if you haven’t noticed, they don’t really do anything.  I had a business that was part of the BBB, and they don’t do much if a customer complains.  Remember, the businesses are the ones paying BBB, so why would they want to destroy a companies reputation that pays them money every year.  Take you grievances to the Attorney General in your state.  They have a lot more power to handle devious sales practices.  APX Alarm has told me that they are now installing new systems in homes with touch screens, but their contracts are still as crazy as before.  Another good piece of information is that if you want to cancel your service when your contract is up, you have to make sure that you send them a written cancellation notice with your account number on the form.  This has to be done 30 days before the end of your term.  You actually can send this cancellation notice in at any time so they have it on file.  If you do not send them one, then they will auto-renew your contract for another year.

If you are a current APX alarm customer, let me know what you think of the company and their service.  I want to hear what you have to say.

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SocialSpark has been a quality Get Paid to Blog platform for some time now.  It has features that other services do not and advertisers seem to enjoy the service.  While SocialSpark has not been used on this blog, I have used it before on other blogs.  The service was good, but obviously needed to be revamped.  Well, everyone welcome SocialSpark 2.0!

I got the email about this change on July 12th, so I figured I would check it out.  After I read their blog about the changes, I can honestly say that I was NOT impressed.  Most features and changes were great until I stumbled upon their Direct Publishing requirement.  This is exactly what it sounds like, where SocialSpark will use your username and password to your blog to automatically upload your post to your blog.  You actually write your post in SocialSpark and then the advertiser gets to look at it and ask for changes.  This does reduce the amount of times that you have to deal with non payments after you run your post, which was a pain for everyone.

While you do get guaranteed payments, you also give up your login credentials to SocialSpark so they can automatically post to your blog.  I am not sure about everyone, but that does not happen on my blogs without careful consideration.  We don’t even allow guest authors to have access via different logins.  It is to make sure that we have full control over the quality of the content.  I think SocialSpark made a huge mistake with this crazy requirement and with other people commenting on this, they agree with me.  This is a no-no for most bloggers.

SocialSpark…..Change this crazy requirement and make it optional for bloggers.  Do the right thing!

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The Buy.com marketplace is the young gun of the bunch when it comes to online marketplaces.  It was developed to be like Amazon with same like fee structure and uploads for retailers.  While the Amazon marketplace dominates the industry, Buy.com has been growing in size and has kept retailers happy with the service.  As Buy.com gets older in age, they realize that they want to start keeping the relationship of the Buyer with them, eventhough the buyer is purchasing from another retailer.

Buy.com allows the customer to contact the retailer if there are any issues with shipping or the product, and the retailer is supposed to respond to those emails as Buy.com does not have an in house email function like Amazon does.  Amazon keeps the relationship with customer because everything comes from Amazon and there are no links to the retailers website in any emails.  Amazon understands this and the retailers understand when they sign on.  Well, it looks like Buy.com has finally caught on to it and they want to make some changes, but not in the best way.

Here is an email excerpt from Buy.com to its sellers asking them to stop from using links in their emails to their website or asking people to go to their website for any answers to their questions.

Hello from Buy.com Marketplace.

Buy.com Marketplace automatically sends emails to buyers to confirm orders, shipment and cancellation/refunds as well as request buyer feedback. In an effort to keep all communication with Buy.com customers consistent, we are requiring that all sellers remove their order confirmation, shipment confirmation, and feedback follow up emails. Buy.com Marketplace will send these emails to customers in all cases. Please ensure that these emails are removed by Monday, February 1, 2010.

As stated Buy.com Marketplace will send all shipping emails, but do ask that all sellers work directly with buyers to resolve any issues. Please review all direct emails you send to Buyers and ensure that you there are no links to your website or requests to visit your website in your customer service communication.

Thanks for a successful holiday season. We look forward to a great 2010!

Buy.com Marketplace

Now this may seem a little strange to some as Buy.com does not provide sellers with a way to email from within their marketplace platform.  How do they expect retailers to change the way that their whole system is setup to be in compliance with an outlandish request.  It seems that Buy.com doesn’t want the retailers to use their standard email program to send responses to customers, but some generic response with no images or signatures.  I hope Buy.com realizes that they will probably feel some backlash with this as large retailers are not going to change their systems to meet the requirements of a young marketplace such as Buy.com.  If they want this to work, they need to develop a email function within the marketplace and until they do so, they need to leave this request behind.  Good luck Buy.com with asking retailers to stop doing what they have been doing for many years.  Lets see how it pans out!

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Register.com is a large domain registrar as well as a web hosting company.  The offer many packages for web hosting, site development, ecommerce development, and more.  We do not use this company, but were asked about them from a visitor that has used them.  The visitor has had some problems with Register.com and their services and asked us what to do about it.  Now we will not be getting into what can be done about it, but we will air what we found out when looking around.

While Register.com does offer web site hosting, we are looking at the do-it-yourself make a website feature.  This is a basic plan for people that want to get into websites.  The funny thing is that the quality of the software that they provide is no where close to the amount they charge and it is not even SEO friendly.  This is our biggest issue because with all the competition out there and so many companies offering SEO ready website templates for their customers, Register.com does not, unless you want to pay an extra $20 a month for meta tag help and search engine submission.  If you are a novice to the online world, this may look like a great deal.  It is not, pretty much a large rip off that will provide you nothing but a thinning wallet.  In this day and age, webmasters do not need to submit their sites to search engines, but rather need to get good quality links directed to their website.  This is a more effective method.  No matter what plan you get from Register.com, they should be providing software that has good quality url strings, alt tags in images, good image names, and better information for the new webmaster to gather when making their own website.

Another issue that we had has to deal with a specific situation that caught us off guard as we did not know that any reputable company would even do this any longer.  The visitor that contacted us said that they purchased another domain through Register and then wanted it forwarded to the original domain.  This is a simple request to say the least, but Register.com screwed it up.  Instead of just doing a server-side redirect or simple domain forward, they inserted an iframe tag into the new domain so that the original website will show up.  So now, this person has their original website on the original domain as well as the new domain, but just in an iframe.  When we saw an iframe, we gasped for air.  We do not see these used much anymore, but for the company to set it up for the customer was aggravating.  A company as the size of Register.com should know that putting an iFrame on a website is a no-no, especially if you are supposed to be doing a domain forward.  All we want to say is: Shame on you Register.com!  You should know better than to provide these lackluster services and have people pay monthly for them.  Unacceptable in our view!

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Consumer Reports just finished a wireless service survey and to find out, At&t is dead last in customer service and satisfaction.  The survey was done in 26 major cities across the US, which gives us a good view on how their networks should be because they are in bigger cities.  Verizon was at the top, followed by T-Mobile, Sprint, and then AT&T.  This does not show good things for AT&T right now since they just started a tv campaign that is fighting back against Verizon’s “We have a map for that” campaign that has been huge.  AT&T says that it has the fastest 3G network in the US, but what they don’t realize is that if it doesn’t work most of the time, then it doesn’t matter how “fast” it is.

The best part is that AT&T replied to the survey to say the “surest indication of customer satisfaction is churn” (or subscriber turnover), which for “postpaid” customers was “just 1.17 percent.”  We think AT&T might have forgotten that most of their customers now come due to the iPhone, which when it goes to other carriers, which will happen, AT&T will lose about half of their customers.

The reason why we talk about this is because this is an example of a company trying to keep their reputation good in the eyes of the consumer with defending their network and their numbers.  The bad thing is that many consumers have told AT&T to fix their infrastructure, but they refuse with the same excuses.  They need to get on the ball and start fixing their issues or they will lose most of their market share because they will offer no value.  They have a good thing in the iPhone, but it cannot keep them up forever and once it is gone, AT&T will scramble to get their customers back.  A word of advice to AT&T, fix your problems now and listen to your customers, or face the immense issues that pushing it away will cause later down the road.

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