ENSIGHTEN CASE STUDY
Vivint: Optimizing User Experiences
Across Devices
by Jim Sterne
Ensighten Case Study: Vivint
Executive Summary
The need for flexible app development is central to the
success of smart home leader Vivint. The company’s
Vivint Sky mobile app is a primary interface to the customer’s home and measuring the app’s user interaction
is the key to its success.
Vivint can change what it
measures whether or not
customers update their app
and can also synchronize
measurement across mobile
platforms.
The Vivint SkyControl panel.
Customer experience improvement is a central tenet
Development and deployment agility has made the Vivint
for the company. A unique app tagging technology
analytics team a pivotal partner in the decision-making
included in the Ensighten Open Marketing Platform gives
process of the company.
Vivint the granular detail to understand its customers
well enough to add machine learning to the mix and
continuously optimize user experiences across devices.
2
Ensighten Case Study: Vivint
Controlling the Home Control
Controller
Vivint creates security and smart home systems. A Vivint
smart home includes a broad range of products and
services, including automatic door locks, motion detectors, indoor and outdoor cameras, a smart thermostat,
smoke detectors, floor/freeze sensors, glass break sensor,
cloud storage, a garage door opener and an innovative
doorbell camera so you can see, hear and talk to anyone
on your doorstep.
Homeowners can access all of these smart home devices
and services from the Vivint Sky mobile app.
The Vivint Sky app can turn
on your lights to wake you up,
lock the door when you go for
a run, lower the temperature
at night and tell you if you left
the iron plugged in…and then
turn it off.
The Vivint Sky mobile app and SkyControl panel are part of the
company’s security and smart home systems.
“My job is to monitor how people use our Vivint Sky app
so we can keep improving it,” says Bunker. “Once TechCrunch calls your product ‘magical’, the pressure is on to
keep it that way. We are fully committed to delivering
an awesome experience.” (Vivint Launches A New Home
Automation System Complete With A Tiny Doorbell
Camera)
Keeping a mobile app up to date is trickier than a web-
The app is the center of attention for Vivint customers
site. “You can make changes on the fly with websites,”
and essential for smart home control while away from
observes Bunker. “With apps, we’re back to medieval
home. Vivint has a million customers, and many of them
times of having to compile code and do batch updates,
engage with their systems multiple times a day. As a re-
only now it’s worse because of the delay in getting apps
sult, the app needs to be foolproof, dustproof, rustproof,
onto our customer’s devices through an app store. That
bulletproof and up to date. The usability team at Vivint
includes even the slightest changes to our tags. That’s
works to make the app foolproof, but making it resilient
why we are so much better off with Ensighten’s technol-
and keeping it current is a major concern for Brandon
ogy, which gives us control of our software.”
Bunker, Senior Director of Customer Analytics and Intelligence at Vivint.
Ensighten is the global leader in enterprise tag and data management, transforming the way marketers collect, own and
unify their data to drive 1:1 customer experiences anytime, anywhere. Ensighten delivers ROI that is more than the sum
of a brand’s marketing technology stack by unlocking the data across everything, including apps, advertising, CRM offline
data, Web behavioral data, and everything in between.
3
Ensighten Case Study: Vivint
Flexible App Measurement
Flexibility is critical when launching a new app. Agile development in tight
concert with user testing and focus groups allow the creation of the best apps
your team can imagine. But once it gets into the hands of real users, consumers will surprise you.
Bunker needed a better way to track how customers were using the Vivint Sky
app to improve the customer experience. For that, he needed better tagging.
Tagging mobile apps is much different from HTML tagging. “The thing about
tags is that you need to know what you want to measure up front,” says Bunker.
A page tag is a piece of
code added to a web page
that collects data about the
website and its visitors.
“This is backwards because the mark of a good analyst is that they keep coming
up with new questions all the time. If you have to wait for another development
When the page is rendered on the
and release cycle to get answers, you lose the ability to think on your feet.”
web browser, the code calls back to
the server and passes information
With Ensighten’s Open Marketing Platform, Vivint is able to update the tags on
about the operating system, the IP
their app on the fly, much like on a web page. They can alter what they are mea-
address of the device, the browser
suring without creating a brand new version, uploading it to the app store and
and its version, and specific actions
waiting, sometimes indefinitely, for customers to download the new version.
the visitor takes on the site.
Coordinated Platform Measurement
The tag can set cookies to collect
Vivint is finding new ways to make the most of the data it is collecting now
that the Ensighten data layer allows the analytics team to syndicate the data
it collects to any location and in any format it chooses. It makes it easier to
synchronize and have consistent tagging across iOS and Android and collect
latent data that is not connected to a screen view.
“This changes the game for us,” says Bunker, “especially when it comes to postlaunch app support. If anything goes wrong, we can catch it before most of our
customers are even aware of it. We also avoid the dirty data problem. When
you’re tracking across different operating systems, variables get different names,
repeat visit information, integrate
third-party content into a website
(e.g., analytics tools, social media widgets and ads) and facilitates the collection of behavioral
information such as the number
of pages visited, products viewed,
content or ads consumed, time on
the page and whether a purchase
was made.
data comes in formatted in different ways. It’s a mess. Once you decouple the
tagging from the development process, you can get granular in your metrics.”
Ensighten enables complete freedom of movement for data to flow across systems, channels, and technologies in one
standard way, in real-time. This allows brands to leverage every piece of information about a customer for every interaction—making it that much more meaningful. Ensighten is the connectedness across it all, giving brands’ customers the
sense of a real dialogue and a real understanding of who they are.
4
Ensighten Case Study: Vivint
Details Make the Difference
The Ensighten Open Marketing Platform ensures that
the Vivint Sky app gets lots of granular scrutiny. Vivint
wanted to monitor much more than just a screen view,
the equivalent of a page view.
When a visitor rings the doorbell, the Vivint Doorbell
Camera sends a push notification to the owner with a
“We keep finding new things
to measure and because of
Ensighten, we can update
them as we go.”
— Brandon Bunker, Senior Director of Customer
Analytics and Intelligence, Vivint
photo of the person at the door. Did the owner ignore
the notification? Open the app? Open the door through
“There are multiple hops in the communication chain. The
the app? Or did the whole process
app talks through the network to the Vivint Sky platform,
take so long that the home owner
then the platform talks to the Vivint SkyControl panel
simply walked to the door instead of
in the home and the panel talks to the door lock. You
waiting?
want all of these hops to be as fast as possible. If the
user presses the Lock button and nothing happens, they’ll
become frustrated and press it again and again. We use
Ensighten tags to quantify and optimize the wireless
algorithm, the retries and the whole, end-to-end process.
We keep finding new things to measure, and because of
Ensighten, we can update them as we go.”
Product Improvement
Through Better Tagging
Improving the speed of the app is one thing. Vivint is
The Vivint Doorbell Camera displays live video clips on the
SkyControl panel.
“The actions people take connected to these timing issues
also using Ensighten tag data to improve the functions
of the Vivint Sky mobile app.
Vivint discovered that when a visitor rings the doorbell,
is decisive to us and the Ensighten Open Marketing
the most common sequence of actions is to connect to
Platform lets us capture all of that experience data,” says
the person at the front door via video and audio, unlock
Bunker. “Everything needs to be synchronized—the app,
the door and then disarm the system. Vivint was able to
the door lock and the home control panel.
turn that data into a more streamlined menu selection.
Native apps are a notoriously difficult channel for marketers to fully use to engage with customers. This is because apps
are heavily reliant on app developers, app marketplaces and users downloading app updates for any change or response
to customer behavior to occur.
Ensighten’s patented No-SDK approach to app marketing transforms apps into real-time environments that behave just
like the Web, solving the problems of time delays and extra app development costs, while making apps a whole lot more
engaging and useful for consumers.
5
Ensighten Case Study: Vivint
When Vivint saw that people were much more interested in the Activity History than first thought, the company provided more quantified home reports and was able
to surface access to them for a better user experience.
Customers had questions that were not predicted in
advance, but seem obvious in retrospect:
•
What time did my teenager come home last night?
•
Did my spouse remember to arm the system?
•
Are my kids home from school?
•
Was the back door unlocked and relocked between
8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., indicating that someone
took the garbage out?
•
Did they change the temperature before leaving in the
morning?
Vivint also found that a smart home has to be really
smart to create a great experience. It’s nice that the
lights in your house and your music turn on when you
open the garage door after sunset. But if your baby has
just fallen asleep, turning on lights and sound is not a
pleasing event.
Real Life is Messy
“To ensure the privacy of a customer’s data and to provide value, we are now using machine learning to seek
out the exceptions and take action where it makes sense,
as well as ask customers if they want the action taken in
other instances,” explains Bunker.
“We gather event data. ‘We see that you arm your security system every night before you go to bed. Would you
like the system to automatically arm when these certain
lights are turned out?’ That sort of thing wouldn’t be
possible if we had to wait for every new version of the
app to measure something else, or if I had to depend
on my other analytics systems that don’t report in real
time. Ensighten Pulse in combination with Ensighten
Manage lets us gather the data we need to respond in
real time and to build behavioral models.”
“Ensighten Pulse in
combination with Ensighten
Manage lets us gather the
data we need to respond
in real time and to build
behavioral models.”
— Brandon Bunker, Senior Director of Customer
Analytics and Intelligence, Vivint
In the long run, this data lets Vivint build a system that
supports an ongoing conversation between the homeowner and the home, rather than creating a million,
Vivint uses Ensighten Pulse and Manage to gather data across
devices, respond in real time and build behavioral models.
nested settings that could easily end up conflicting and
tripping over each other.
Ensighten is built to support the complex matrix of teams and agencies that exist within enterprise brands. Ensighten’s
workflow and governance features make it easy to extend access to the appropriate levels of tags and data. Ensighten
standardizes the way teams work together to manage data-centric marketing initiatives.
6
Ensighten Case Study: Vivint
Bunker is excited by Ensighten’s ability to break down
the app, and that’s simply not possible with a tradition-
data silos. “Experiences don’t live in a silo and neither
al SDK implementation. We can add new variables or
should your data. If our mobile analytics data were stored
events, or we can change data formats and end up get-
in a silo then it would not be actionable by our smart
ting new insights even on legacy versions of the app. This
home. For instance, people in the same house often have
ensures that our data is not fragmented and stays clean.”
different preferences when it comes to home automation. Some people like the thermostat hotter while others
Vivint now has the ability to evolve. With dynamic tag-
like it colder. Breaking down the data silos enables our
ging, the analytics team can focus their attention on
machine learning to personalize the automations to your
where they find value. They can ask new questions every
preferences so that you can come home to your favorite
day. “This makes us a better analytics partner with the
temperature.”
rest of the business,” says Bunker. “We are more confident in our data and more open to ad hoc questions.”
Summary
Fueling all of this technical creativity is the measurement
flexibility Ensighten provides to Vivint.
“We are now able to maintain a consistent experience
across legacy versions of the app and even introduce
new, killer features into old versions of our app. We know,
“We are in total control of our metrics,” says Bunker. “We
for example, that people would like to share videos from
can change what and how we measure things even
their security system to the social sphere. That’s some-
after the customer downloads the app. We maintain a
thing we’ll be able to retrofit into our legacy apps using
common analytics code base across multiple versions of
the Ensighten Open Marketing Platform.”
ABOUT JIM STERNE
Founder, eMetrics and DAA
Jim Sterne produced the world’s first Marketing on the Internet seminar series in 1994. Today, Sterne is an
internationally known speaker on electronic marketing and customer interaction. A consultant to Fortune 500
companies and Internet entrepreneurs, Sterne focuses his 30 years in sales and marketing on measuring the value
of a web site as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written seven books
on Internet advertising, marketing, and customer service including, his most recent, Social Media Metrics: How to
Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. As a Founding Director and President since 2004, Jim is the
Association’s spokesperson and chief cheerleader, leading the organization to deliver on its mission — uniting and
educating analytic professionals, consultants, practitioners and educators.
ABOUT ENSIGHTEN
Ensighten, the global leader in omni-channel data and tag management, is changing the face of digital marketing by transforming
the way enterprises collect, own and act on their customer data across all marketing channels and devices. The Ensighten Open
Marketing Platform enables enterprises to achieve true one-to-one personalization, accelerate the execution and optimization of
their marketing initiatives and deliver superior user experiences. Ensighten, with its unique hybrid-tagging™ technology, powers
companies generating over $1.9 trillion in revenue in over 150 countries. The world’s leading brands (Microsoft, Capital One, United
Airlines and T-Mobile) achieve marketing agility by implementing Ensighten’s single line of code.
Phone: (650) 241-3343
|
Email: [email protected]
|
Twitter: @ensighten
© 2015 Ensighten. All rights reserved. All product and company names are trademarks
or registered trademarks of their respective holders. [v11172015]
|
www.ensighten.com