No matter the time of year, smart home support calls can be complex; more than half of them are for wireless connectivity loss, rather than any issue with the device. But during the holiday season especially, as consumers take advantage of seasonal sales, support teams need to be ready for a deluge of these calls.
Just this year, Black Friday spending alone was estimated to reach $17 billion—which means smart home brands are seeing millions of new devices showing up in homes around the world in a minuscule amount of time.
As if that weren’t enough, these already-complex issues are becoming more and more difficult every day. According to recent Parks Associates data, the average home in North America has 14 devices connected to its WiFi network—and 36% of them have at least one smart home device already.
Between the sheer volume of smart devices out there now, and the fact that people are adding more to their homes, home networks are under an immense amount of strain.
What’s the key to handling these calls?
Typically, the first response to higher volumes of support calls—especially when you know they’re coming—is to onboard seasonal agents to help handle the workload. As you can imagine, this can be troublesome for support teams for a few reasons:
- New agents need to either know all about WiFi and networking, or pick it up quickly
- Onboarding processes take time that new hires don’t always have
- It’s expensive in terms of process, training, and increased headcount
No, there’s a simpler way to handle these calls, and it all comes down to one essential tactic: Understanding why issues are really happening.
When you know what’s causing WiFi connectivity issues, that defines how you can respond.
If the issue is the device itself, then that’s relatively straightforward for smart home support teams to resolve. But problematically, most of the issues that consumers have with smart devices, especially when it comes to setting them up and configuring, aren’t actually anything to do with the device itself. In fact, our data shows that over 45% of technical issues with connected devices are because of a loss of wireless connectivity.
These issues are overwhelmingly caused by issues within the consumer’s home network—but they often get incorrectly diagnosed as device defects.
Using our in-house data from over 29 million devices around the world, the team here at RouteThis uncovered the top 10 root causes of issues that smart home devices face when it comes to setup and configuration.