The Reinvigoration of Smart Home Installer Services

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1Q 2019 | IN-5354

In December, major U.S. retail chain Office Depot launched a smart home installation service that is available from all of its 1,400 retail locations across the country. The move was the latest in a growing trend among retailers to integrate smart home installation alongside off-the-shelf devices. It is a trend that can seem to contradict much of the direction of the smart home market in a decade where devices and systems have gained traction through more user-install friendly devices and systems. However, the drive for installation services illustrates something more nuanced.

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Office Depot Joins the Smart Home Retailer/Installer Market

NEWS


In December, major U.S. retail chain Office Depot launched a smart home installation service that is available from all of its 1,400 retail locations across the country. The move was the latest in a growing trend among retailers to integrate smart home installation alongside off-the-shelf devices. It is a trend that can seem to contradict much of the direction of the smart home market in a decade where devices and systems have gained traction through more user-install friendly devices and systems. However, the drive for installation services illustrates something more nuanced.

Office Depot, Amazon, and Best Buy Installation

IMPACT


Office Depot’s smart home services are part of its new Workonomy Tech Services unit. The unit has become a Nest Pro Partner, and this enables it to offer installations of Nest and Google devices. Office Depot has priced its offerings to start at US$99. Office Depot will manage the installation through CompuCom, a managed services provider and product reseller that was acquired by Office Depot in November 2017.

The offering is one of many that have increasingly aligned retailers with installation services. Amazon had first rolled out installation services in seven U.S. West Coast cities in July 2017, but these have since been branded as Smart Home services and extended to the following areas: Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Florida, and Washington, DC. Unlike the company’s more general Home Services portal that connects Amazon-vetted independent installers with Amazon consumers, the Smart Home service has been focused on supporting Alexa devices and their integration. During this past year Amazon has also expanded its offerings to include a wider range of devices that can be built into smart home systems.

Both Amazon and Office Depot are trailing Best Buy and its Geek Squad operations. Geek Squad has been part of Best Buy’s business since the computer repair company was acquired back in 2002. Although the retailer has long supported high-end smart home installations through its Audiovision and Magnolia acquisitions, it is the Geek Squad operations that target a far lower price point and less intensive smart home deployments. In late 2017, Best Buy launched its In-Home Advisor service that provides free in-home consultations for products and services that include smart home systems.

Installation and the Maturing Smart Home Market

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Smart home has a long history of supporting high-touch, high-end small and specialist installers. These vendors typically offer equipment from specialist OEMs such as Crestron, Savant, and Control4. Such systems and their installation a significant price tag. However, Installers have begun to include many lower cost, off-the-shelf devices as consumer awareness and the brand appeal of these devices has grown. For example, Nest has long offered professional installation to its customers through its Nest Pro program; these have typically been offered by smaller local and specialist providers. Likewise, home improvement retailers such as Home Depot and Lowe’s have offered installation services from affiliated contractors; these stores have increasingly offered smart home devices, so many installers have expanded their capabilities to support them.

In addition, as security and other players moved into the smart home market earlier in the decade, installation has become a key part of their offerings. Pioneer smart home vendors such as Vivint have long invested in delivering their own in-house installation capabilities and continue to do so despite expanding their offering to include more off-the-shelf products.

The smart home market has been driven for the past decade by the appeal and value of low cost, simple-to-understand, and easy-to-install devices, but interoperability standards remain elusive. Consumer-focused smart home platforms from Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung, Wink, and many others have sought to deliver ways for end users to pull together devices from multiple vendors together to build more system-like installations through partnerships. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have also extended their own offerings to include additional branded devices so they can provide simplicity for new and existing users to build out their smart home functionality without fear of running into interoperability issues. Adding installation services is another aspect of delivering greater simplicity.

At the heart of much smart home voice control investment has been the ability to connect smart home services more with a range of home and other consumer services. However, if end users are using just a fraction of a voice control device’s functions, the value of that installation is limited for the end user and the service provider. If voice-control front-end devices are only being used to get weather information, it stifles their potential to expand smart home systems adoption And limits the value of that device vendors investment. Installer partnerships help grow the potential for far greater smart home application adoption.

Finally, smart home installation services are also indicators for wider consumer change. Even though there has always been a segment of the market that will use professional installations, this segment appears to be growing. There is a consumer shift that increasingly values time-saving efficiency over cost. Home help apps such as Takl, HomeAdvisor, or TaskRabbit (acquired by Ikea) all service a growing demand for professional home services for jobs that would previously have been the domain of end users. The extension to smart home installer services also fits with this wider trend.

More flexible, low-cost smart home installation services are an increasingly attractive market and is one that smart home players will embrace. The extension of those services to a national retailer such as Office Depot reveals that it is not a failure of devices to support self-installation but rather that it is another indication of how mainstream smart homes have become and how OEMs and other smart home players continue to adapt to the changing smart home landscape.

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