Smart and trustworthy

Yale is about to launch a new smart lock in the UK with no levers, and is at an advanced stage of development with sensors in regular hardware for windows and doors. Paul Atkinson, sales and commercial director at Yale, explains that since £10.8 billion will be spent on smart home devices in 2019 in the UK, now is an exciting time for the fenestration industry.

Research shows that 52% of consumers are willing to pay for a smart product that improves home security, and 12% are willing to pay a premium.

Last year Yale partnered with John Lewis and Waitrose to develop the UK’s first in-home delivery service, which demonstrates how smart products can not only protect your home but also how they can enhance everyday lives.

Yale also partnered with: AirB&B to assist landlords with lettings; Philips Hue to integrate lighting into security; and Amazon to integrate Alexa with alarms and in-house delivery.

Yale’s range of home security devices helps you protect, monitor and control your home, anywhere at any time, via your smartphone or tablet. Yale ensures that smart products provide added value, better performance and improved lifestyle benefits for the end-user and are backed up with comprehensive after-sales service protecting our customers’ business and our brand.

Being able to tell whether a door/window is locked or unlocked is a limited user case and I would suggest it is not enough to convince most people to part with their cash. It would frustrate me if I learned my home was unlocked but couldn’t do much about it.

The real attraction comes when technologies are integrated as part of other systems – security alarms that beep telling you that the bathroom window is left open when you set them before leaving the house, or being able to ask Alexa to lock the door and ask if every door/window is locked down as you go to bed.

To the fabricator or retailer, product reliability and after-sales support is a critical consideration when partnering with a smart hardware provider. Think about in the retail environment; window/door sales offering smart products. If those smart products are delayed or struggle to operate correctly and easily, the consumer will simply criticise the whole installation and potentially hold up payment. That may seem relatively easy to manage but these days it is simple for consumers to use negative online feedback to damage a great glazing product’s reputation, which has been built over many years.

Yale has many years of provenance and experience of selling various smart security products in volume in the UK, US, Scandinavia, and the far east. We have a wealth of materials to help educate homeowners on the new technologies, including brochures and informative how-to videos, along with a fully trained call-centre.

Yale also offers workshops where fabricators and installers can visit the Smart Living showcase suite and get hands-on experience with the devices.

When shopping for smart products, consumers will look for added reassurances such as the industry recognised standards Secured-by-Design, PAS24:2016, and the new PAS621:2018, which adds Kitemark as the recognised UK standard for smart locking devices. We also need to consider that we talking about electronic devices and the various standards required such as RoHS compliance.

Last year Yale worked alongside the British Standards Institute to help create the Smart Door Locking standard PAS621:2018 to help regulate the industry and provide consumers with a benchmark for quality. Yale’s Conexis L1 Smart Lock was the first-ever smart lock to be British Kitemarked approved under this standard.

In May 2018, the new GPDR said that products need to be built on ‘privacy by design’ principles meaning that it isn’t solely about data protection but developing devices during the design and manufacturing stages so that data doesn’t need protecting.

For example, Yale’s Smart Living range has end-to-end encryption guarantees, and information can only be kept and analysed in strict accordance with the consumer’s wishes.

Within the smart home market there is a great opportunity to build trust with customers by listening to data privacy concerns and, every step of the way, consumers must have the right to opt-out of having their data collected or shared. This is where the strength of the brand will come into play as homeowners will choose companies they trust.

This provides opportunities to enter into more of a partnership with customers rather than just a traditional supplier relationship.

Yale is dedicated to ensuring that products that are brought to the market are RoHS-compliant and, moreover, can be disposed of responsibly under the WEEE compliance directive.

www.yaledws.co.uk