Vivint Security Alarms

Vivint Security is a new comer to the RGV and I recently had a Vivint Security salesman drop by my house and introduced me to the all new Vivint Home Security System. The young man was very polite and professional and seemed to be very knowledgeable on the product he was selling.

As I have previously worked for an alarm company, I was curious about his sales pitch and how the alarm system itself measured up. I listened to his whole spiel and looked at all the brochures. The price was tempting enough to make me seriously consider purchasing one and I was very impressed with the system itself. The one thing that immediately caught my attention was the monthly monitoring fee, which was unusually high compared to other companies. The use of cellular monitoring explains the price.

The analyst side of me though, insisted on doing more research. What I found was really disappointing and I immediately decided against signing on the dotted line. That kind of bothered me because I really liked the system.

What I found was that Vivint was re-branded in 2011 from its original brand of APEX. Much of the speculation and facts of the re-branding centered on the negative criticisms, reviews, and complaints from customers. Although Vivint has a BBB rating of C+, it still shows 1,800 closed complaints. Closed only means that they made contact with the complainant, not necessarily satisfied the complaint.

I looked up reviews online and found many negative reviews about the service, especially that the promises the salesman made were not reflected on the actual contract. Another common complaint was the poor customer service when it came time to cancel the service or when a customer had to move. Basically, the customer was locked in to a five year contract with no possibility of parole.

One customer even said he disconnected his entire system and boxed it up, yet the control center told him it was working just fine. Of course, they were still charging him a monthly fee, which they automatically withdrew from his account. Another poor guy from Mission said that although his system seemed to be working just fine, Vivint was not actually monitoring his house for 3 months and claimed there was nothing they could do about it. That right there totally turned me off.

I still believe that the Vivint System is a good alarm system with many excellent features but, I just wasn’t going to risk a negative experience with a faceless company based in another state.

So, if any of my readers have had any experiences with Vivint, good or bad, please comment.

Reviews can be seen at:

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/apx_alarm.html (one complaint from RGV posted here)

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/directory/vivint (another RGV complaint here). Seems Vivint got a hold of ripoffreport since none of the 178 complaints are visible, only their statement about dedication to customer service.

http://www.reviews.com/home-security-systems/vivint/

http://www.yelp.com/biz/vivint-inc-austin

Vivant http://www.vivint.com/en/