Vivint Customer Story

Vivint’s technicians install and maintain equipment and operate entirely from the field — most of the company’s service professionals rarely report to a central office. In the past, that made communication among the home office, managers, trainers, and technicians challenging. Managers had to rely on phone calls and email to send orders, plans, and updates and relay other information to the field.

Technicians were bombarded with emails, which meant that sometimes important communications were overlooked. Managers also had no visibility into whether particular technicians received or understood the information they were sending. “We were inundating their email inbox with so much information that sometimes it was difficult to manage,” says Kyle Christensen, communications manager for field service at Vivint Smart Home.

In addition to the challenges with manager-to-field technician communication, the technicians themselves didn’t have an efficient or effective way to communicate with each other and share knowledge. They used ad hoc solutions like WhatsApp or GroupMe, but this meant that managers were left out of these conversations and the IT staff had little control over the applications being used — or information being shared — in the field.

Vivint Smart Home wanted more accountability and transparency in its communications. The field services team felt that a messaging tool could help narrow the scope of communications to critical information that the technicians needed to complete their work. Instead of requiring technicians to weed through a high volume of messages to find crucial details, the platform would deliver those details in an easier, more consumable way.

Zinc offered a number of features that Vivint Smart Home believed would improve its operations. For example, employees can be easily organized into groups or teams using the tool. Urgent or important messages can be separated from day-to-day conversations.

"It was easy to onboard and offboard users. We can push alerts to the entire field and control messages from one to many. We can also save messages that are important. Technicians can go back through the broadcast center feature and see all of the important updates saved in one place."

Vivint Smart Home has improved employee and customer satisfaction using Zinc. "We have an internal employee satisfaction score we measure every year, and we’ve seen a 50 percent improvement in employee engagement scores since deployment," shared Barborka . "In talking to the field, we learned there was a variety of factors that contributed to this, but Zinc was a big one."

The company’s field service net promoter score (NPS), which measures customer satisfaction for installation and service, is now in the 80s, which is one of the best scores in the industry. "The messaging system really helped promote high performance in our teams," Barborka said. "We talk about what happened and what we did on-site; if something didn’t go our way, we can discuss that immediately using Zinc."

The company also has more visibility into the communication habits of the workforce. "We’re starting to correlate performance with those communication habits," Christensen said. "That’s already having a big impact on how we develop our workforce. We’re gaining all sorts of interesting perspectives and insights by correlating those behaviors. Generally, we see that the folks who have higher communication levels are our higher performers."

The system (along with the other mobile technologies) has also contributed to efficiency increases. "Collectively, we’ve seen our time to service — the ability to get to the customer quickly when they call — drop by 37 percent in the past year," Barborka said. "We’ve also seen a reduction of 13 percent in service returns or second visits to complete a job." The company has also experienced a 23 percent reduction in returns of installs over the same time period.