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7 ways CheckMyCCTV can enhance your maintenance contracts

Traditional CCTV maintenance contracts are typically ‘reactive’ by definition, consisting of one or two visits to site a year to check the operation of the CCTV system. The contract can also include a guaranteed response time when a fault is reported. This pretty much hasn’t changed since the inception of CCTV installations.

With the advent of network attached CCTV systems, installers can provide a ‘proactive’ maintenance contract option using CheckMyCCTV. Here’s 7 reasons why a proactive maintenance contract, powered by CheckMyCCTV, is beneficial to you and your customers:

  1. Reduce your costs – Accurate and timely health monitoring using CheckMyCCTV can reduce your service and maintenance costs by providing targeted service visits.
  2. Increase revenues – You can add value to your current maintenance contacts by including 24/7 CheckMyCCTV health monitoring to your ‘Platinum’ contracts.
  3. Reduce costly site visits – The chances of a fix in the first visit are greatly increased. Issues are diagnosed remotely, so you know what is wrong before you attend site.
  4. Improve your service offering – In today’s difficult trading environment, you can provide a higher level of service to your customer base than your competitors.
  5. Puts you back in control – CheckMyCCTV diagnoses and reports the faults instead of relying your customers detecting faults.
  6. Manage your security estate more efficiently – CheckMyCCTV can monitor many hundreds of sites, allowing you to manage larger and more geographically diverse security estates.
  7. System checking is automatic – No extra resource is needed to manage CheckMyCCTV, it automatically checks at the intervals you set.

CheckMyCCTV is FREE to try for your CCTV installations. Contact us to discuss how CheckMyCCTV can  enhance your CCTV maintenance contracts and arrange a free 14-day trial.

Is your CCTV faulty?

Are your CCTV systems working right now? It’s a pretty simple question but in reality a difficult one to answer. There’s often no quick way of knowing if remote CCTV systems are operating as expected, which is where CheckMyCCTV can help.

In many cases faults are often only discovered when an incident occurs that has not been recorded, and by then it is too late.

We wanted to discover how many sites had typical faults or issues which were undetected. So with the help of our customers, we gathered statistics from a sample of 300 sites and included only the initial test result to represent of the state of the CCTV system prior to using CheckMyCCTV.

The results were surprising, 75% of all units tested had at least one issue which affected operational performance requirements as highlighted in the UK POLICE REQUIREMENTS FOR DIGITAL CCTV SYSTEMS document.

45% of units were recording for less than 31 days.
31% of units had the time set more than 1 hour fast/slow.
24% of units had the incorrect Timezone/Daylight Savings time configured.
16% of units had one or more failed cameras.
6% of units had problems with Alarms not activating.
2% of units were not recording at all.

Fortunately, CheckMyCCTV identified these issues and they were rectified by the installer. However, without using CheckMyCCTV it may have been several months before the issues were noticed, leaving a critical security gap in the users CCTV coverage.

It seems that there are plenty of documented cases where CCTV systems have been installed and are assumed to be working, but were not. I quickly found a number of examples by entering ‘faulty CCTV’ into Google search:

CCTV cameras weren’t working during Digbeth club shooting

Blackburn town centre CCTV cameras ‘faulty’

Quarter of council’s CCTV cameras not working

There were many more listed in the search results, and along with the Van Gogh painting which was stolen from Cairo Museum which I wrote about in a previous blog, it seems that faulty or incorrectly configured CCTV systems may not be as uncommon as first thought.

Want to find out if your CCTV systems are operating correcting? CheckMyCCTV automatically performs a number of checks on all your CCTV installations every day to ensure you systems are operating as expected. Contact us today at sales@nullcheckmysystems.com to trial CheckMyCCTV FREE for 14-days.

 

Try CheckMyCCTV free for 14 days

Contact us for a FREE 14-day, no obligation trial today, and find out what CheckMyCCTV can do for your business.

Typical users of CheckMyCCTV are:

Installers wanting to offer a higher level of support to their customers and still reduce support costs,
End-users who want to ensure their CCTV estate is operating correctly, and
RVRCs wanting to increase revenue streams by providing a CheckMyCCTV service to their customers.

CheckMyCCTV is compatible with Dedicated Micros, Vista (SmartDisc, SmartTel, SmartMobile, and Navigator), HeiTel, Dahua Technology,DVR365, Adata, and WatchMan DVR products. More brands are coming soon, if your CCTV system is not listed, request it today.

Register to download the CheckMyCCTV FREE 14-day Trial here

Van Gogh theft blamed on faulty security

A perfect example of ensuring that your Security systems are working was demonstrated when a Van Gogh was stolen from Cairo Museum back in August. It transpired that none of the alarms were working and only 7 out of 42 cameras were operational.

If you work in the industry you probably thought this was down to shoddy workmanship or poor maintenance, which it may well have been. However, if someone was to ask you how many of your cameras are operational right now, would you be any the wiser? You may be able to check back on the last maintenance visit and point out that everything was working when that was complete, but it may have been many months ago and a lot could have changed since then.

You could give your customers training on how to detect whether the system is operational, but do they have the time, inclination, or skills to do the job properly, after all Security systems are often a grudge purchase for your customers anyway, so they are often locked away only to see the light of day when an incident occurs.

CheckMyCCTV gives you and your customers the tools to ensure that their security systems are working correctly, in the case of the stolen Van Gogh, CheckMyCCTV would have reported that cameras had failed and alarms were not being triggered, so at least the customer or installer would have been aware that their security was severely compromised. It could be argued that this may not have prevented the theft anyway, but to be forewarned is to be forearmed as they say.

Welcome to our Blog

Hello, and welcome to our blog. Here we will be keeping you up to date with what is happening at CheckMySystems, along with hints and tips, product enhancements, and any other news.

Please feel free to leave comments, suggestions, or feedback, we’ll try to respond to all that we can.

Thanks for reading.

Darren Rewston
CheckMySystems Ltd.