7 golden rules for launching your connected products successfully
29 März 2022 / PRODUCT INNOVATIONS
Digitizing your products means offering new services to your customers, setting yourself apart from the competition, and positioning yourself in the homes of tomorrow. In short, it means building your business by providing your customers with even more added value.
Are you a manufacturer who wants to stack the odds in your favor? We’re letting you in on our 7 partner tips…
1- Develop practical specifications
The success of a connected solution depends on the right balance between hardware and software, design and development, and budget and marketing. Be pragmatic and ask yourself the right questions in order to identify your needs, make technical choices, and set your geographical scope. One of the most important questions to ask yourself is whether or not you want to focus on just one type of product. If so, you can decide on a technological protocol and a direct connection without a gateway. Do you want to aim for as much openness as possible with other equipment and ecosystems? You’ll need a multi-protocol gateway to tap into the potential for extensive compatibility. Finally, pay attention to how much time you have before launch so that you can avoid unpleasant surprises.
2- Prioritize the customer experience
Customer experience lies at the heart of your relationship with your users. With the IoT and its capacity for data collection and analysis, you have access to a gold mine for refining your customer profiles, understanding their behaviors, and offering them value-added services. Your promise consists of more than some gadget. While complying with the GDPR, ask what you can provide to your customers—that is the best guarantee for standing out.
3- Pick a solid platform
Choosing the right infrastructure to support you is vitally important, on that meets every single one of your specifications. Do you need a partner to build the whole solution in its entirety or just a few parts of it? No matter what, you need to be careful not to under-size your cloud architecture in such a way that would prevent it from scaling efficiently when deployed on a large scale or if you are successful beyond expectations.
4- Don’t compromise on security
First and foremost, your solution’s security must hinge on focused risk analysis. Performing a risk assessment at exactly the right level will eliminate added costs and time, as well as unnecessary development. One way or another, the reliability of your chosen platform and its commitments to data protection and confidentiality must be one of your non-negotiable priorities.
5- Take good care of your application
Go for a turnkey app with a white-label solution that allows you to customize your colors. This will help you avoid unnecessary development costs and save loads of time. Again, you need to focus on the user experience. From ease of use to intuitiveness and design… your customers will thank you! And don’t forget about the professional version for your technicians and installers.
6- Plan for maintenance
There is nothing worse for your customers than a malfunction or service disruption. And there is nothing more counterproductive for your technicians than an outage that slows them down unexpectedly. Implementing an effective real-time remote monitoring and predictive maintenance solution reduces after-sales costs and increases customer satisfaction.
–> See our e-maintenance solution
7- Don’t forget about compatibility
Your connected solution should serve your customers as much as it serves you. For them, its full value comes from its ability to interact with other IoT devices in the home in order to create a variety of scenarios (ex. a presence sensor is nice, but interaction with an alarm and rolling shutters is even better). For you, this is an opportunity to develop new partnerships and open up to new markets.