Frontpoint Locks in a Better Customer Experience

Like so many other companies around the world, Frontpoint Security, which provides do-it-yourself home security equipment, such as cameras, burglar and fire alarm systems, sensors, and home automation systems, was challenged at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to fill its customer service agent staffing needs.

Though the worst of the pandemic was over by 2022, many of the staffing challenges remained for Frontpoint, according to Derek Carder, the company’s chief operating officer.

“As you can imagine, with DIY products, when customers need help, they need it on demand,” Carder says. “We had wait times that were exceeding 30 minutes. We knew there was a smarter way to solve the problem as opposed to just hiring more people.”

Frontpoint did not yet have an artificial intelligence-based chatbot or virtual assistant and was looking for one that would enable it to get product guides out quickly to customers to lower issue resolution times.

“So many companies out there count their ability to deflect contacts, but our big focus was ensuring that customer demand and customer needs were actually met. We are more focused on customer resolution, which enables us to prevent churn. It ensures that they don’t unplug the system when it’s not working.”

Frontpoint was already using Zendesk’s chat platform, but selected Mavenoid for its other needs.

Mavenoid is a Swedish company that provides both human- and AI-enabled support and troubleshooting tools for hardware companies, serving to automate customer onboarding and technical support.

“The Mavenoid system allows us to evolve content, add images, and create customer flows on demand that we were able to put into our individual agents’ hands so that we didn’t have to go through the process of sending it to a marketing team, putting on the polish, and then deploying it. Our actual team members could craft these flows and push them out in a matter of minutes as opposed to a matter of weeks,” Carder says.

The other big differentiator: Mavenoid enabled agents to guide flows internally and create separate workflows for customers and agents rather than using two different solutions to do the same thing, according to Carder.

And Mavenoid provided a lot of help during installation, Carder adds. “We were very stretched for technical resources at the time. We told them that we couldn’t pull anybody off our tech teams.”

Once Frontpoint shared its knowledge base, Mavenoid’s solution architect crafted the flow and helped with the deployment. “It was about a three-week process for us to go live,” Carder says.

Frontpoint Security went live with the Mavenoid solution in 2022.

“We saw success right off the bat,” Carder says. “It enabled us to deflect some of the initial calls and led to quick customer resolutions. The self-service resolution rate was 55 percent to 56 percent—much higher than we expected. If we had been taking those phone calls (via agents), it would have cost us an extra $20,000 to $30,000 a month.”

Another important gain for Frontpoint has been the customer satisfaction rate, which Carder says has been averaging 92 percent.

Based on its success with the Mavenoid system so far, Frontpoint expects to add videos to its self-service capabilities within the next year. With it, agents will be able to ask customers to point their smartphone cameras at the product and the agent can zoom in, draw on the screen, and share links to guides on how to solve the problem.

Frontpoint also recently deployed Mavenoid’s sales widget, which guides prospects through the buying process, enabling them to build their own security system, then receive a quote. “We just launched it, so a measure of our success will be the conversion rate, which should at least be on par with our internal sales team. I’m hoping to exceed that,” Carder says. 

The Payoff

Since deploying Mavenoid, Frontpoint Security has seen the following results:

• deflected 55 percent of calls to self-service;
• saved an estimated $20,000 to $30,000 a month; and
• achieved a 92 percent average customer satisfaction rate.