‎Disappointed During Ian Hurricane | SimpliSafe Support Home
 
JeffG360's profile

Saturday, October 1st, 2022 4:53 PM

Disappointed During Ian Hurricane

I don’t know where to start. I won’t bore you all but SimpliSafe completely failed me when I needed it most and I won’t forget.  My home in Fort Myers lost power. Obviously. Did I get an alert? No. Did it fall back on battery and cellular, Yes! The one positive! However it disconnected from every sensor in the house!  Nothing was connected! I had a running base station and no sensors. I was on the phone with tech support for over an hour. In the end their suggestion was to go to the house, delete the sensors, and re-associate them. Huh? 

Insult to injury, is the entire process of getting support! The hoops to jump through. Once connected it was as if they didn’t know who I was. Asking my name, etc.. Wasting my time with verifying stuff that, since I verified through the phone tree, why wasn’t my account on the screen of the tech I was connected to when they picked up? 

I had to send screen shots of the WebApp. Half way through the ordeal the person I was working with confused my two homes and then started asking about my 3rd. I finally just was exhausted and gave up given I can’t fly down there and reset everything.

In the event of a natural disaster, SimpliSafe should get a War Room ready and have Play Books that detail typical issues and resolution. You should have the ability to flag accounts in the effected areas. Be proactive and send a message of how your customers can best prepare and what they can expect.

Wow…now that I write this, I hope the “small team” we keep hearing about didn’t do anything to reduce their sensor alerts and call volume! Can you imagine the volume of just water leak sensors?  You don’t suppose…

Official Solution

Community Admin

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5.7K Messages

2 years ago

Hi @JeffG360 ,

I'm sorry to hear that you had such a tough time working with our Support team, on top of an already stressful situation. We've requested a call from a senior specialist to make sure that you're fully taken care of.

2 Messages

2 years ago

The thing with cellular backup during a storm is it's entirely dependent on the cellular networks being up and operational. If the fallback network (which is cellular) is knocked out during the storm, how can you expect your system to work even if it has a battery backup? That will happen with any alarm system that relies on a cellular connection for backup. I typically don't expect to reliably receive alerts or system status during a hurricane.

As for your support experience with SimpliSafe, I understand how that was frustrating and they definitely should've been able to provide you with better support.

19 Messages

@macgenius​ Totally agree! I apologize if I wasn’t clear. That’s not what happened. I, and tech support, could see and communicate with the base station over cellular. Cellular was working. It showed on battery and active. However, the base station simpli stopped communicating with every sensor in the house for no apparent reason. As a SimpliSafe promoter for years I’m disappointed. Maybe my issue is an outlier but unfortunately it was the kind of situation you invest years of service payments to overcome and the investment didn’t pay off. FOR ME!

Community Admin

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5.7K Messages

@JeffG360​ ah, that's definitely a different situation. Assuming that your sensors themselves are fine, we'd want to troubleshoot their communication with the Base Station. For example, there could be a fairly powerful wireless signal that's causing major interference - though normally you should see a "Wireless Interference" warning on your timeline, because your system would be able to detect it.

Or the Base Station itself could be placed in an area where it either was already having trouble receiving signals (e.g. if it was in a closet, on top of a fridge, or surrounded by dense walls), or something might have happened to block those signals.

All of the above would unfortunately require working with the equipment locally, and more than just a reboot which wouldn't necessarily resolve them. But we do have our escalations team on the case, and hopefully we can get this figured out for you soon!

(edited)

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