Drupal 8 and Web Personalization for Vivint Smart Home
Vivint, the premier provider of smart home products with a focus around security, came seeking Drupal development pros and killer design team to realize a vision: a premium, personalized and consultative experience for prospective customers new to smart home technology.
The brief appeared simple enough—develop a quiz-style microsite that generates personalized product recommendations to Vivint’s users.
A pay-per-click campaign would drive a percentage of site traffic to the experience (rather than a typical homepage). A series of questions would generate a personalized results page that recommends products and displays supporting content (i.e. blog posts, testimonials, proposals) based on user responses. The idea was that the personalized experience would educate customers and lead to more productive sales conversations.
Executing the personalized product wizard, however, proved to be a far greater challenge.
The Logic Behind Personalization
With any kind of Drupal 8 personalization, the logic behind segmentation and targeting is key. From anonymous IP filtering to user-based inputs, it's important to map out the if/then scenarios so that you know how to respond—we want to avoid sending people down roads we have no content for!
The first step to creating the wizard was to determine which questions would best identify a prospective customer’s problems. Vivint created a list of potential questions and asked people at their state-of-the-art usability lab to rate the importance of the question. We took the prioritized list and narrowed it down based on what questions signaled what products or content people would likely be interested in.
Our UX team then worked with our Drupal developers to give structure to the list and map the appropriate fields to the Drupal 8 database.
Smart home noob or IOT pro?
Users' responses aligned with one of four customer personas, which tied them to a specific need or pain point they were starting with. The emotional state of someone recovering from a recent burglary, for example, is very different than someone why just wants to play with their lights on their phone.
- Prevent (prevent an event - i.e. a burglary)
- Restore (restore peace of mind post-event)
- Conserve (conserve energy)
- Convenience (home convenience)
To simplify the DIY product catalog, we help hone a few narrow sets of products sets to minimize choice and cognitive lead. Each persona aligned with one of three smart home kits:
- Smart Secure (Prevent & Restore)
- Smart Control (Conserve)
- Smart Complete (Convenience)
A user’s responses determined which version of the results page was generated upon completion of the wizard.
Personalized results, delivered.
Smart Content, a custom Drupal 8 module designed and built by our own Drupal developers in-house, made it possible to generate different versions of the results page. Based on the different user personas, the results page displayed a personalized smart home kit recommendation and displayed supporting content that the different users identify with. For example, if a user fit the “Conserve” persona, the header video that appears on their version of the results page addresses pain points that are common among those users.
The results page also generates personalized content based on a user’s location. If a user chooses to input their zip code, the results page displays insights about their potential energy savings, and data about how many other Vivint Smart Homes are in their area.
Always Be Improving
As the wizard proves its effectiveness over time, ongoing optimization will improve conversion even further to increase call frequency, increase the productivity of sales calls, and improve sales-to-install rates across the organization.
