My wife and I recently spent a week hiking several of the trails along the St. Lawrence River just north of Quebec, Canada. I love hiking for the beautiful natural scenery and the great health benefits, but the other reason I like to hike is that it allows me to spend several uninterrupted hours thinking more deeply about topics that randomly pop into my head.
On one of our river hikes, I kept thinking about our industry and the marketing fascination we have with the concept of providing home technology experiences. Over the last several years, we’ve been told repeatedly that we should be selling our residential clients experiences, not products. It’s the lighting scene that matters most, not the specifications of the lighting fixtures or keypads. I can’t dispute the logic of that statement — in fact, our Daisy Los Gatos branch built a New Home Technology Experience Center specifically to show our builder partners and potential clients the experience of living in a smart home.
Then I thought more about why the average smart home customer rates their home technology experience as a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10 — meaning they are so dissatisfied with their home technology experience they would not recommend it to others (this result is based on a recent survey by one of the industry’s largest home technology control companies). What happened to this wonderful smart home experience that we were delivering to our clients? How did it go so awry?
Also by Gordon van Zuiden: Pivoting to Services
At about five miles into my 10-mile hike came my “aha” moment. The term home technology experience was missing two key adjectives — “short-term” and “long-term.” As an industry, we are great at providing short-term home technology experiences. We design and install beautiful integrated technology solutions for our homeowners. Our clients move into their new or remodeled home and they often marvel at the whole-house audio/video, comfort, security, and communication solutions that we elegantly integrate into the construction of their home. They use their touchscreens, keypads, universal remote controls, phones, and increasingly voice to control all the technology in their home — smart home nirvana! Their short-term home technology experience matches the home technology experience we promised they would enjoy.
Short-term positive experiences are great for activities such as going out to an excellent dinner, watching an award-winning movie, or a competitive sporting event. You enjoy these moments with fond memories when you reflect back on them. The problem is that clients typically don’t live in their homes for the short term. They live in their homes for 5, 10, 20 years, and often longer. For a client to truly enjoy their home technology experience requires that our industry satisfy these long-term experience needs with the same attention that we give to the short-term experience.
We need to establish long-term after-care service programs with the same level of detail and responsiveness as we do for the initial project design, installation, and programming. Without this long-term attention to servicing the smart home, our future customers will come to us jaded by the bad smart home experience they had in their previous home and limit the wonderful home technology experiences that we know that we can provide for them. How often has a new client come into your office stating that their lighting control system never worked properly, so now they just want wall switches? Or the universal remote for their TV surround sound system never worked consistently, so now they just want a TV?
Taken as a whole, the custom home electronics integrator industry has let down the long-term service needs for our smart home clients. We are already feeling the backlash and skepticism of our clients wanting to implement all of today’s wonderful smart home solutions. Fortunately, it’s not too late to counter those concerns, but it will require that our industry shift its focus from leading with projects that have ongoing service requirements to leading with services that will stimulate new project sales.
That’s a major shift in all of our business models — and, for many of us, this service-first business model is too difficult to implement on our own. Companies like Daisy, OneVision, Parasol, and several others have emerged over the last several years to provide the backend support to help custom electronics integration companies navigate from a project-first to a service-first business model. The faster that our industry embraces and rewards this service-first business model, the quicker we will be able to deliver and maintain the memorable smart home technology experiences that we first promised our clients.
Also by Gordon van Zuiden: The Custom Integrator Playbook for the Next 25 Years
I purchased my Lexus, a car that I still drive today, in 2007. It has 175,000 miles on it, it’s been serviced by my Lexus dealer about once each year, and it still drives great. If asked, I would definitely buy another Lexus, and I would appreciate all the new features that a model almost 20 years later would provide. It’s been a great short- and long-term experience.
That’s the type of short- and long-term experience that our industry should strive for — one where all our potential clients would happily install our home technology solutions in their homes and brag to their friends that they couldn’t live without it (or us!). When that day comes, I’ll feel that the smart technology has truly reached its full potential to improve all our lives in the most important place on earth — our home.
