The haunting of a smart home: A Halloween tale

 
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It was a dark and stormy night, as the trick-or-treaters headed out for a hopeful night of collecting confections and sweets. Every house on the street was decked out in spooky style, ready to welcome only the bravest of the brave.

But unbeknownst to the neighborhood, there was one haunted house that was a little more haunted than most.

A problem most sinister.

This particular home had ambitious goals for its upcoming Halloween. The owners had bought all sorts of new WiFi-connected devices, from speakers to light bulbs, to bring their haunted house to life—but now, they found themselves haunted by the ghosts of their own WiFi network.

As much as they tried, they just couldn’t get their new devices to connect to their WiFi network—and time was running out.

So they did what any would-be haunted house owners would do, and they set out to fix their network problems once and for all. First, they checked the devices—but all were plugged in and on. Then, they checked on the router, but that wasn’t the problem either.

Was it the device’s app? No, the only clue there is that the app can’t find the new devices on the network, with no explanation of why. Will they be able to solve the problem in time for Halloween?

Now’s the time to banish WiFi connectivity issues.

Too often, homeowners are left to fend for themselves in the face of smart device connection problems—but they don’t know where to start rooting out the problems blocking their connections.

So what can smart home support teams do to help?

First, you’ll need the right tools.

If your support team is going to get rid of whatever’s haunting a customer’s network, you’ll need a reliable toolkit to find them, communicate with them, and guide them out.

For this, your team will need visibility into the home, something that’s notoriously tricky for smart home support teams. Keep an eye out for solutions that can help you peer into customers’ home networks, as well as ones that work with the processes your team has established—and try to avoid any that might require extra hardware or firmware.

Then, you need to know what to look for.

What’s affecting a home can take many forms. You’ll need to know how to pinpoint a particular poltergeist before you can figure out the best way to get rid of it.

These issues are highly skilled at hiding out of sight, and won’t always make themselves obvious. For this, look for solutions that offer detailed diagnostics to help your support agents look into every nook and cranny.

And finally, you need to know how to handle the situation.

Even once you figure out what you’re dealing with, there’s a lot that can go wrong—and relying on guesswork to sort out the problem will only exacerbate it.

You’ll want to make sure agents know exactly how to handle any situation, so they can take care of business quickly, effectively, and without any follow-up hauntings. Look for solutions that can analyze diagnostics and suggest clear resolution paths.

Too many WiFi issues? We can help.

When you equip your smart home support team with RouteThis, you won’t need to call in any iconic specter-banishing specialists to get rid of WiFi connectivity problems. Instead, your team gets the latest and greatest in scanning, identifying, and resolving technology, all through the customer’s smartphone or tablet.

So everyone can enjoy a safe, happy—and surprisingly un-haunted—Halloween.

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