The number of smart homes in Europe is predicted to rocket over the next four years,
New consumer research in the UK shows that worries and frustration over tech reliability and uptime are significantly impacting people's willingness to install smart home devices.
Respondents were also clear about the solution: if they knew they could connect their devices easily and maximize their reliability and performance, over six out of 10 people (60.4%) would be willing to invest more in connected devices. This figure is highest among the key 18-34 age group, with around three-quarters (73%) ready to become more connected if their tech irritations and reliability concerns could be fixed.
The key question, of course, is how to provide this reliability and confidence? And this is where insurance comes into play. The research found strong evidence of consumer appetite for a single insurance and tech support package, encompassing all their smart devices, regardless of when or where they purchased them. Over two-thirds (67%) of consumers in the survey said they wanted such a package, with the figure standing at 82% for 18–34-year-olds.
Clearly, there's a desire across the ages to avoid the administrative hurdles of dealing with different contact points and helplines for each of their devices, and to avoid device downtime.
What are people complaining about?
To gauge the relationship between the connected homes revolution and consumers' feelings and experiences about tech reliability, the Asurion Europe research also investigated the extent of the issues that people face with their home devices and what they feel about them.
- Almost half associated their growing digital dependency with increasing technical issues, saying that the more connected devices they have, the more tech issues and complications they suffer.
- Around a third suffered a serious technical issue — such as a connection outage or hardware failure — at least four times a year.
- Almost a quarter experienced a serious technical problem with one of their connected home devices at least once a month.
- A third complained that the issue of electronic device problems and failures in their home was wasting increasing amounts of their time. This rose to over half in the 18-34 age group.
As we all know, these issues can have a variety of consequences in our lives — including work meetings derailed, key deadlines such as university assignments or work projects missed, documents lost, smart thermostats and doorbells being rather un-smart, or even downtime in the devices and systems that make independent living safer or easier.
Even in less serious settings — say, an internet outage interrupting the deciding minutes of a key sports game on TV — consumers' faith in the connected home can all too easily be eroded by these tech issues and complications. Which in turn can affect their future decisions about whether to purchase further devices.
Fortunately,
