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How to make a complaint, how we’ll handle it, and what you can do if you’re still not satisfied.
Effective 30 October 20268 minute read
Legal
In this document
Our customers rely on us to protect their homes and businesses, so when something goes wrong we want to know about it. This procedure explains how to make a complaint to Shields Group, the business that designs, installs, monitors and maintains intruder alarm, CCTV and video doorbell systems for homes and businesses under the Shields Group name (“Shields Group”, “we”, “us” and “our”), how we’ll handle it and what you can do if you’re not satisfied with our response.
We’ll treat your complaint fairly, take it seriously and deal with it promptly. Making a complaint won’t affect the service you receive, and there’s no charge for using this procedure. It’s open to customers, to people who have asked us for a quote, and to anyone else affected by our work, our website or the way we’ve handled their personal information.
A complaint is any expression of dissatisfaction with our products, our service, our people or the way we’ve handled a matter, where you want us to respond. It might be about, for example:
If you simply want to ask a question or report a fault, we’ll deal with it as a service request. If you want it treated as a complaint, or a service request isn’t resolved to your satisfaction, we’ll handle it under this procedure.
If you’re in danger, or a crime is happening, call 999 first.
If your alarm isn’t working, isn’t being monitored, or is showing a fault that leaves your property unprotected, email contact@shieldsgroup.co.uk with URGENT in the subject line. Tell us your name, the address of the protected property and what you can see in the app or on your system. We’ll prioritise putting the problem right before dealing with any complaint about it.
You don’t need to wait for the fault to be fixed before complaining. Once your system is protecting you again, we’ll deal with any complaint about what happened under the stages below.
Please email your complaint to contact@shieldsgroup.co.uk. You can also write to us at the address shown in your Order or on your latest invoice. To help us deal with it quickly, please include:
If you can’t provide everything on this list, contact us anyway and we’ll ask for anything else we need.
Please tell us as soon as you can. Alarm events and verification clips we hold are usually kept for no more than 31 days, so if your complaint is about how we handled an alarm, please contact us promptly.
A relative, friend, adviser or solicitor can complain for you. We’ll need your permission to deal with them, and we may ask you to confirm it, so that we protect your personal information.
We want everyone to be able to raise a complaint easily. If you have a disability, a health condition or other circumstances that make it harder for you to complain, tell us what would help. We’ll make reasonable adjustments, for example:
Our Accessibility Statement explains other ways we can help.
When we receive your complaint:
Where we find that we got something wrong, we’ll say so. Depending on what happened, putting it right may include an apology, an explanation, a return visit, a repair or replacement, a correction to your records or account, or another remedy that’s fair in the circumstances.
If you’re not satisfied with our Stage 1 response, reply to it, or email contact@shieldsgroup.co.uk, and tell us which parts you disagree with and why.
Your complaint will then be reviewed by a senior manager who wasn’t involved in handling it at Stage 1. They’ll look at it afresh, review the investigation and the evidence, and may ask you or our team for more information.
We aim to acknowledge your request for a review within 2 working days and to send you the senior manager’s written response within 10 working days of receiving it. If the review needs longer, we’ll tell you why and when to expect it.
The senior manager’s Stage 2 response is our final response. It will set out our final position and the reasons for it, what we’ll do, and the other options open to you if you’re still not satisfied, including the information about alternative dispute resolution described below. If you’re happy with our Stage 1 response, your complaint will be closed at that point.
We aim to send our final response within 8 weeks of first receiving your complaint. If we haven’t been able to do so, we’ll write to you to explain why. You don’t have to wait any longer: after 8 weeks, you can take your complaint to the other routes set out below, and we’ll keep working to resolve it.
Alternative dispute resolution (“ADR”) is a way of resolving a dispute between a consumer and a business with the help of an independent third party, without going to court.
Shields Group isn’t currently a member of any ADR scheme. If you’re a consumer and we can’t resolve your complaint through this procedure, our final response will tell you in writing:
If we agree to use ADR, the provider will explain its own process, timescales and any fees. Using ADR doesn’t affect your right to go to court.
You can also get independent help at any time, although we’d appreciate the chance to put things right first.
The Citizens Advice consumer service gives free, confidential and impartial advice on consumer problems, and can pass details of a complaint to Trading Standards where appropriate. Visit citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer.
If you’re seeking compensation, you can make a claim through the small claims track of the county court, which is designed for lower-value claims without the need for a solicitor. You can start a claim at gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money. Court fees apply, so we recommend you take advice first.
If your complaint is about how we’ve handled your personal information, including camera footage, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent regulator for data protection. The ICO usually expects you to raise your concern with us first. Visit ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint. Our Privacy Notice explains your data protection rights.
Time limits apply to legal claims and keep running while we consider your complaint. If you’re thinking about legal action, take advice early.
We expect everyone who works for us, including the operators of our monitoring partner, to behave professionally and respectfully. If you’re unhappy with the conduct of an engineer or an operator, please tell us using this procedure.
Every operator is background checked. Operators can’t open your cameras, or listen or talk through them, unless your alarm has been triggered or you’ve asked us to check, and you get an alert on your phone every time an operator views them. If you believe your cameras were accessed outside those rules, tell us straight away, with the date and time of any alert you received. We’ll treat it as a priority and tell you what we found. Our Camera Privacy Commitment explains these rules in full.
Where the operator works for our monitoring partner, we remain responsible for handling your complaint. We’ll investigate with the partner and respond to you ourselves.
If a complaint raises a serious concern about someone’s conduct, we may restrict their access to our systems while we investigate. We’ll tell you the outcome, although we may not be able to share details of action taken in relation to an individual.
Complaints show us where we’ve fallen short. We review the complaints we receive to spot patterns and underlying causes, and we use what we learn to improve our service, training, processes and the information we give customers.
We keep a record of each complaint, how we investigated it, our responses and the outcome.
We handle the personal information in complaint records in line with our Privacy Notice, and keep it only for as long as the retention periods set out there allow. Only the people who need to see your complaint, to deal with it or to oversee how complaints are handled, have access to it.
This procedure was last updated on 30 October 2026.
Email our team and we will respond to your query.
