Coming Soon: Inovelli Rewards Program

[Eric_Inovelli]

Hey guys, thanks so much for your input – we love it – exactly what we were looking for. We have a meeting with the team that’s developing this on Thursday and have incorporated pretty much everything on the lists above!

@jmason888

Another thought: you have beta testing—both closed betas for new devices and open betas for firmware. For closed betas I could see “gold” (or whatever your upper teir is called; maybe “Red Series” ) folks getting to the front of the beta tester queue. For both closed and especially open betas, perhaps points for bug reporting? More points for reproducible example and/or analysis (or whatever else helps the engineers fix the bug and/or the community work around it) than for a simple “I did this and it didn’t work” report…

Yes, this is a great idea – and goes along with what @datavortex mentioned below, which I 100% agree with. We’re not the company we are without you all contributing to the overall product(s).

@jmason888

With the second generation devices, I’m excited to see Inovelli focusing on what I see as your core competencies—really awesome switches—for which there is nothing comparable on the market. (Yeah, smart bulbs too, Illumin is pretty cool…) I can’t wait to see what comes out of R&D in the next year or so… And I think a program like this might help get the word out to new potential customers.

I agree!

@jmason888

My home automation journey really ought to be its own post

Let’s see it! I’d love to read it – I think there is an older post here by @simriv123 (How did you end up deeeeeep in home automation?) that was an interesting one – but yeah, I’d love to have a separate post talking about people’s journey’s – it’d be interesting to read and also help us understand where most people start. One of the struggles we have is that most people do not start with Z-Wave (or a hub for that matter) but rather with Alexa/Google and when they want to get serious with their HA journey, they start researching hubs and stumble upon us.

@jmason888

the money you spent on Amazon “sponsored” placement worked: before I got into Z-Wave I was buying Kasa switches, and Amazon kept suggesting Inovelli gear.

Yeah that’s great to hear – we actually have really good metrics with Amazon sponsored ads, but it’s good to see the anecdotal evidence vs just seeing Amazon’s data lol

@jmason888

What finally won me over was the support: I thought about the most difficult use case in my house: a virtual three-way between lights on two different circuits, where two-way sync would be needed. I had some ideas about this and opened a ticket… and got a response the same day from @Eric_Inovelli basically saying that it was an interesting question and deferring to @EricM_Inovelli who had the complete answer within a couple of days.

I remember this for sure – I think I even said it was above my pay-grade lol

@jmason888

I don’t know how you folks manage such great support, with responses from the founders to customer inquiries, but I was impressed.

We appreciate it, definitely hard work (as well as a work in progress) as it’s such a small team, but we’re all passionate about HA so that helps!

@jmason888

I just saw that my first shipment of Red Series dimmers has been delivered. I’m so excited to install them this weekend!

Keep us posted! Happy to help

@amdbuilder

What about offering points for creative usage ideas? It’s easy to say the product is great, but being able to show examples (think recipe book) may have more value.

Doing it “right” in my mind you would have a list on your website that could be filtered by hub and Inovelli device. Then the user would know this idea would work for their specific equipment.

Yeah definitely, question for you – our first thoughts were to put them in the, “tips and tricks” section where each hub is located in the community.

ie: Hubitat = https://community.inovelli.com/c/hubitat/hubitat-tips-tricks/18

However, we will be building something similar to what you suggest in the next couple of months in that we’ll be creating a, “blog” (it’s not really a blog, but more of a, “choose your own adventure”) where you can read through various use cases and at the end of each article, we’ll list links on how to do that with your hub. This then leads to our Knowledge Base (support.inovelli.com).

I suppose we could list it in both places which should help with SEO.

@kreene1987

Tier 1: Direct Purchases - Should probably be 75% weight or more because this directly impacts your bottom line.

1. Self-Purchases (really appreciate purchases since 1/1, but even further back would be better. I think since V2 was released).
2. Referred purchases (add a referral code system like Tesla OR by username on purchase form entry?) This could be added to checkout form.
3. Leaving an approved review over 250 characters

Love it – we’ll have to brainstorm a bit around the referral program as my gut instinct tells me this could be abused, but then again, at the end of the day more products are sold, so that’s always good. However, I definitely agree with @Chris in that I don’t want it to tarnish any reputation we’ve built nor the credibility if every post on FB, Reddit, etc is, “buy Inovelli and be sure to use the code: xyz” (I’m being dramatic, but you get the point). I do, however think that people should be rewarded for spreading the news in a credible way.

@kreene1987

Tier 2: Support/Community Involvement

1. Marked as Solution posts
2. Top 25% and Top 5% tiers counted ~monthly
3. Beta software testing/bug discovery
4. Clicked links to support articles.

Love the addition of #2 and #3 here. #4 is good too and we were thinking of trying to figure out a way to have people actually read the support articles without just clicking the link and receiving points without learning anything. Maybe put a 3 question quiz at the bottom to earn the points? I’m not sure.

@kreene1987

Tier 3: Social Media

1. Videos broadcasting company
2. Social Media tagging (not sure how you would integrate?)
3. Community joins from social media (via registration form)

Awww yeah – now we’re cooking!

@kreene1987

Tiers could add up to “insider” rank
Insider

1. First crack at beta testing registration
2. Beta testing software
3. Priority Support (some of us DO have issues still!)

This is good too – I like these! The Priority Support is pretty easy to accomplish as Zoho Desk allows you to tag someone as Priority and the goal (separate project) was to tag priority people, people who have spent $x amount over their lifetime, etc.

@kreene1987

Insiders should get 10% off products and merch always.

Could be something!

@zavex

@kreene1987

Leaving an approved review over 250 characters

It might be worth avoid this. It can devalue the reviews - even if they are actually legitimate. It may make people question if they were done for the “reward” or because they really feel that way about the product.

There is definitely a fine line here that we’ll have to balance. Also, oftentimes English is not the first language so it may discourage someone from writing a review.

@Chris

Interesting idea.
I think the biggest concern, is that a financial reward will push some people to jump through the program hoops for the sake of the reward. IE post a lot of reviews that don’t really say much, answer a lot of forum questions with barely-acceptable answers, etc.

I do very much like the idea of an incentive for people who drive the community and create a lot of good content. I am just encouraging caution to avoid unexpected negative results.

This is especially true with an affiliate program- you don’t want to find Inovelli affiliate spam causing problems on other websites. And if half the recommendations online to buy Inovelli carry an affiliate link, that may end up reducing the brand’s credibility as it could be viewed like a MLM program.

I’m just saying- as you create the problem, be always thinking ‘how will a moron abuse this’.

Yeah totally – you raise a great point and something we encourage everyone everywhere in our company (ok, there’s 7 of us lol) – is to be real. Customer service will talk to you like you’re a real person – our responses are not scripted and even if our product doesn’t solve a solution, we’ll recommend a competitor in a heartbeat.

We definitely do not want to tarnish this reputation with spam. I love your last sentence and will keep that in mind!

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@datavortex – I didn’t want to copy your entire post as this response is getting long, but I’m going to let you know that your response really hit home and I actually copy/pasted it to the team we’re working with. You’re absolutely right in every paragraph – thank you!

@Melerann

I think a country-specific community subboard is something that would help bigtime. I remember when I first found you guys how much of a pain it was to get product to Canada, and how bulk opportunities didnt exist until some fellow canadians explained thier meathods for getting around things. Even just broad catagories like: Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Ect. Would help a ton.

I’m going to move this to a new topic as I’d love to discuss your thoughts on this. I think it’s a great idea and we’ve talked internally about it before – we just couldn’t think of a good way to design it. What we’re talking about here is the Rewards Program, so I didn’t want to confuse people.

@vreihen

How about Detroit Lions tickets in the Inovelli VIP corporate suite at Ford Field???

LOL – That would actually be pretty sweet. We’ll have to sell more switches to afford that VIP suite though!

If only the Red Wings weren’t absolutely terrible… I’d like to go to the new arena.

@gibbor

In addition to the redeemable points, you could track the total lifetime points earned and give bonuses at certain milestones. For example, when you have X number of lifetime points you get free stickers, t-shirt, hat, switch, discount on next purchase, etc.

That’s an interesting idea!