OneVision Positions Tech Support Service to HTSA as Recurring Revenue Solution

“There needs to be an entire profession around this and there needs to be a whole service model around it,” said Kolchinsky of tech support. He began his business -- currently serving some 50,000 households -- in 2008, but the catch for OneVision is the same one facing electronics dealers: convincing customers to pay for tech support. Most of OneVision’s 50,000 customers don’t pay for service. But Kolchinsky has 40 households that do -- paying from $100 to $100,000 per month for a premium service contract, he said. His goal is to transition nonpaying customers to premium offerings.

Kolchinsky compared the tech support revenue challenge that electronics integrators face with the challenge newspapers and magazines experienced with the rise of the internet: Consumers don’t want to pay for it. “People have an implicit expectation of getting free tech support,” he said. Publications like The New York Times, after years of experimenting with unsuccessful strategies, finally landed on the paywall model where users get a certain amount of content for free before a subscription is required, said Kolchinsky, who’s eyeing the same kind of strategy for connected home tech support. “What does this industry’s paywall transition look like?” he said. “That’s what we’re figuring out.”

OneVision’s pitch for HTSA is to offer free phone or email support and then charge customers a monthly premium to get faster in-home “priority” support, which dealers would handle on-site. “Right now, the whole industry has just been jumping whenever the client says jump, with no plan and no prescriptive approach,” Kolchinsky said. “The idea is to start to give the clients what they want: instant, free, basic support” because “everybody expects a little bit of help for free,” he said.

Under that scenario, a customer might call about a problem with Netflix, he said. “You can’t bill them for 15 minutes,” he said. Typically, integrators can’t afford to do that kind of instant troubleshooting for free, so they schedule the customer for “four hours later or the next day,” he said. OneVision takes those kinds of support issues and offers “instant” support within 30 minutes 24/7, promising a median response time of 10 minutes via email or phone, he said. That saves dealers from having angry customers who they have to try to appease with free onsite support, which is expensive in time and labor for integrators. “You’re giving clients what they need and you no longer have to jump 10 feet high,” he said.

The 15-person OneVision team is “basic support,” Kolchinsky said, and the local dealer becomes advanced support. “As soon as the client is escalated to advanced support, they know they’ll be billed hourly for the work,” he said, and a client who wants faster in-home support can upgrade to a priority membership that guarantees same-day service, he said. The integrator pays OneVision 50 percent of the service fees for premium support, he said.

The next step is to proactively monitor a home’s system “when we notice something goes down,” he said. Remote monitoring allows OneVision to check the health of the home’s technology and see when devices are “up or down, or nearing end of life or need to be replaced,” he said. “That prevents the pain of technology not working when they need it.”

OneVision’s staff handle about 1,000 support events per month, said Kolchinsky. On how the company keeps up on technology at a level required for tech support, he said, “Long term, that’s possibly a problem; it’s something we have to resolve.” Basic support is about “workarounds and fixing a simple thing,” he said. Advanced support is “the complicated stuff.” OneVision can handle basic support with limited training, he said.

Integrators have asked how OneVision can solve problems “if we don’t know all the systems,” said Kolchinsky. He didn’t answer directly but instead focused on the importance of responding to customers immediately and to establish OneVision as customers’ “path of least resistance” to technology problems. Once OneVision's paying customers came to see the company as a reliable support resource, “they started calling for everything,” even things like billing issues with Netflix, he said. “It’s stupid little stuff but people still pay to have someone help them through these issues,” he said. "Eventually, people will figure out the simple stuff themselves, but there will be complicated things. We’re all going to have more technology and the issues are going to be more advanced.”

OneVision staffers are largely ex-Apple Store employees who the company unabashedly poaches, Kolchinsky told us. Apple Store employees are “very well trained, have incredible emotional intelligence, a deep understanding of technology and troubleshooting, and they’re also very used to selling on the fly because they’re used to selling AppleCare and other things,” he said. Apple Store employees are ideal for OneVision because they’ve been trained in technology and in marketing and sales, he said. “That’s excellent for us because we use our service interactions to constantly educate and engage with our clients to introduce them to our premium support offerings,” he said.

HTSA Executive Director Jon Robbins told us he’s hopeful OneVision can “crack the nut” of making tech support a viable recurring revenue model for dealers. “It’s a high learning curve,” Robbins said. “People have tried with Alarm.com and others but I don’t know a ton of success stories.” Selling tech support contracts requires guidance and someone who can go out and solicit the business, Robbins said, and he thinks Kolchinsky’s model is viable. HTSA members will have to commit to the program for it to work and they'll have to “trust the process,” he said.

Trusting the process could be the hardest part, HTSA President Franklin Karp, chief operating officer of Audio Video Systems, told us. “Recurring revenue is something we want to do.” His company’s tech support staffers are concerned about “losing control” of the customer relationship to another company, he said.

Karp sees OneVision as a solution to several tech support headaches for his integration business. Charging and collecting for tech support can be uncomfortable for integrators, so outsourcing maintenance to OneVision can solve potential headaches, Karp said. Working with OneVision also could help minimize the burden of working nights and weekends for Audio Video Systems’ tech support staffers who “take calls on Friday night at 10 p.m. and when they’re at Cub Scout camp with their kid,” he said. “In my mind, I’m there,” Karp said of working with OneVision, “but my service guys are not so sure.”

Robbins echoed the ambivalence dealers are feeling about handing off customer relationships to an outside tech support firm. “Sometimes when something is new to you, trusting the process is a high wall to climb,” he said. “But we have to continue to work on it, and make it a stronger part of our business.”