Growing a business is tough when you’re losing customers

After making some modifications to our home security system in 2011, our monthly fee went from about $25 a month to about $38. After paying that fee consistently for over a year, my most recent automatic payment was over 50 percent higher, an unexpected – and unexplained – increase. Around the same time, I had stopped receiving e-mail notifications that my alarm was armed, disarmed, etc.

I contacted the vendor to get the details, and a friendly woman – named Emily – called me within 24 hours to follow up with me. Emily told me that the company had recently conducted an audit of their accounts, and it turned out that I should not have been receiving the Internet-based service, so they just decided to remove it from my account without notifying me. That audit also indicated that I should have been paying $10 extra a month for a maintenance service plan that we didn’t want in the first place, but was listed as one of my services, so – again without any notification – they decided to just slap on two months of $10 service plan fees to my last automatic payment.

Read the rest at The Washington Business Journal