The only value to a monitoring service would be if they had a call center that could politely deal with our clients. This type of service would mean no more leaving the restaurant to take a tech support call. You would be paying someone to solve a problem for you.

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Call center: Hello, how may i help you?

My client: My Crestrons broken.

Call center: What room are you in?

My client: Family Room

Call center: Looks like you have a TPMC-8X in there. What happens if you press any of the buttons? Do they light up? Can you change pages?

My client: Yes. I go to TV/Music and press DirecTV and i can see the denon surround receiver turn on and the TV turns on but the screen is black.

Call center: Sounds like the DirecTV receiver may be off or locked up. Let me power cycle the Family Room DirecTV receiver. Tell me if you see anything on the screen.

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Unlike the typical tech support call where everyone is calling sony about the same model Blu-ray player.. Our clients and systems are all different. It would be a very painful phone call to try and get a client to explain the system to the call center tech. And it would be impossible for the call center tech to know how we have the system configured.

So to make this work we would have to provide very detailed information about each project and the call center would have to hire real techs not card readers. I dont think the company i work for would have a use for services like this. Maybe a mega company that does 100 projects per year. It would be worth it for them to come up with a process for handing clients over to the call center.

About 7 years ago we started putting in UPS/Surge protection for everything. This cut down on the number of product lockups and having that reset switch in an accessible place for the client means that they can typically power cycle things themselves and they never have to call us. Now that we can remotely power cycle things we can handle resets for the clients who are afraid to touch the racks.