OneVision Resources CEO Joseph Kolchinsky sees his company as more than just a turnkey service provider to the custom integration channel. He also wants to help integrators modernize their service departments and overall approach to service. To do so, the company has invested heavily in training programs and personnel for its dealer partners and has added augmented reality and video chat tools to its Tier 1 support system to improve the experience for end-user clients.
“We want to help integrators re-define the relationship they have with their clients so that instead of just being one-time product installers, they lifetime technology managers,” Kolchinsky explained. “This is important, especially given that their clients have an ever-growing and evergreen need for quality tech support and tech management services.”
While 24/7 Tier 1 tech support lies at the core of OneVision’s offering, the company also has invested in what Kolchinsky says is a “massive” partner development effort to document all of its processes and procedures, invest in a learning management system, and to train all of its partners.
“We now have four people on our team that are just dedicated to training our partners,” he said. “We don’t charge for them. We don’t make money on them. We simply have them devoted to our partners to teach better service practices.”
OneVision wants its partners to better understand how to provide service and manage it internally, as well as make it a core part of their operation, properly charge for it, delivering it to the client in a “better, sustainable, more profitable fashion.”
Now that the RSM space has matured and consolidated—following Control4’s acquisition of Ihiji—OneVision is looking to standardize those offerings into its own tech support procedures. Ihiji was the first partner and Domotz was added most recently.
“We worked with Domotz for the last few months to communicate features and requirements that we had and brought them into our platform for the benefit of our partners,” Kolchinsky explained. “Our plan, of course, is to support all three major platforms, but we’re also out there actively expanding our technology set overall, beyond the RSM space.”
Part of that enhanced technology set is augmented reality and video support that allows OneVision to better support end-user clients through video chat. While providing support, a OneVision specialist initiates a one-way video chat with the client, allowing a live look for the tech at, say, the back of the client’s AV rack. The tech can then control the flashlight on the client’s phone and check the client’s phone battery level, and confirm their the strength of their Wi-Fi. The also have the ability to “draw” on their screen.
“These tools make it much easier for us provide support remotely,” Kolchinsky said, noting that they might want a client to reset a specific device in the rack, but are unsure where to find it. In that scenario, the tech support person would take a photo of the rack, then use the drawing tool on the photo to circle the right button that the client needed to push to reset the system.
OneVision integrator partners eventually will have access to this new technology, which they may use when their team provides remote support if OneVision was unable to solve the problem.
“It’s a great example of how integrators on our platform are benefitting from our scale,” Kolchinsky explained. “We went out, researched a solution, bought it and implemented it, and overnight all our partners are able to start taking advantage of it. We’re excited about how our scale is allowing smaller companies to provide a bigger company-style service without losing their focus on relationships.
Kolchinsky says that the 2,000 support events that his company manages a month will also improve in quality through this investment, and that the support that they provide on an ongoing basis is already better.
OneVision also markets and sells service contracts on behalf of partners. The new technology enables them to better walk an end-user client through the sales process and sign them up for the service.
The process of researching and implementing these new tools, not to mention creating best practices for its internal team and dealer partners led OneVision to launch the 1NSIGHT Summit, the industry’s first service-focused conference. It will be held in Boston in the spring of 2019.
“Not only is this a way to get all of our partners together, but it’s also a way to share best practices with the industry as a whole,” Kolchinsky said. “But it won’t just be us preaching. We’re bringing in outside experts from service provider brands so that our integrators can really learn from the best in the world about how to provide service.
“What we’re doing in this industry is not new. Service is not a new concept in the world. It’s just a tiny bit different and new for our industry. All of these service problems that we’ve been struggling to solve for the last decade have already been solved elsewhere. We’re bringing those outside perspectives in.”
To learn more about OneVision’s Service Conference or to register, visit https://www.1nsightsummit.com/
