Amid consumer creep, there’s an unprecedented opportunity for integrators to evolve, expand, and redefine their value.
You’ve probably noticed: Your clients are increasingly convinced that the same technology they use at home should work just as well for them in the office.
This trend, called “consumer creep,” reflects a new attitude among tech users: If the affordable, simple devices they use every day are reliable enough for at-home use, they must also be “good enough” for commercial environments … right?
As consumers face tighter budget pressures at work and draw confidence from positive experiences with consumer tech, they’re left to question why commercial systems are so complex and costly … especially when a cheaper, more straightforward alternative appears to fit their needs. And they believe they can avoid a service contract if they treat the original, low-cost technology as “disposable.”
The preference for plug-and-play setups is rising, and this could push customizable, robust systems to the back burner, especially if basic functionality is all users expect (or at least believe will suit the majority of their needs). What your clients likely don’t realize, however, are the risks associated with settling for “good enough,” including:
- Reduced reliability
- Limited scalability
- Short product lifespan
- Increased security vulnerabilities
- Lack of compliance with industry standards
- Difficulty integrating with other commercial systems
Integrators are seeing these consequences play out often, as clients opt for inexpensive components that fail often but are easily replaced. Or consumers roll out residential-grade security platforms across dozens of sites, believing convenience outweighs longevity until a security breach, compatibility problem, or unexpected failure causes costly downtime or exposes larger liability.
How to Grow Stronger in a Changing Market
While this may seem like the start of an existential crisis for integrators, there’s another side to consider with consumer creep: an unprecedented opportunity to evolve, expand, and redefine value.
Here are some examples of what we mean.
Delivering Value at Volume
The move toward simpler, consumer-like solutions opens doors for volume-based business. Instead of fighting a losing battle to preserve complexity, you can pivot to offer scalable, repeatable, low-complexity systems (think preconfigured “room-in-a-box” AV solutions or standardized, cloud-managed security deployments).
This helps you create solution “templates” that are fast to install and easy to replicate for efficient, high-volume business. This may also position you to better serve price-sensitive SMB clients or manage rollouts across hundreds of locations.
Becoming a Trusted Advisor
When end-users can buy “professional” displays, cameras, or other systems online, technology is no longer the most valuable service and capability you offer—your guidance and advocacy are.
Integrators can add real value by:
- Educating buyers about the differences between short-term savings and long-term performance and risk reduction. Help them realize the cost of technology failures and disruptions. Audio especially is an area that should not be compromised since so much is done via videoconference. Microphones and speakers are core components of doing business online.
- Diagnosing and correcting reliability issues caused by DIY or consumer tech, often before they become expensive failures or safety problems.
- Helping clients choose the right combination of off-the-shelf products and enterprise-grade solutions.
Offering Services that Stick
Hardware margins are shrinking, but service opportunities are expanding. As systems become easier to deploy and maintain, what can you offer after the project is “finished”?
Service-based models can create a powerful revenue engine through:
- Remote management and monitoring like health checks, patching, and analytics to catch and resolve issues before they disrupt operations or affect end-users
- Lifecycle upgrades to proactively replace aging hardware and software, preventing obsolescence and minimizing downtime
- Hands-on training for end-users and their staff, giving them full access to their systems
- Compliance audits to identify gaps and ensure that all technology meets regulatory, industry, or insurance requirements
Services like these ensure that your clients keep coming back, confident that their technology investment will stay current, resilient, and effective as long as your expertise is behind it. Subscription models (SaaS) can wrap all of these points into a service (consider a hardware and software package preconfigured for a small/medium/large conference room and ready to deploy).
4 Tips to Evolve Your Value as an Integrator
There’s no denying that consumer creep is changing the landscape. But it also gives you a chance to deliver smarter value, broaden your influence, and secure stronger customer relationships in key ways.
1. Embrace Simplicity for Clients that Need It
Consider building out “good-better-best” proposals to educate clients and let them see the value differences between simple and advanced solutions. Where possible, bundle services that highlight lifecycle value—remote monitoring, annual refresh planning, compliance reporting—as the real differentiator.
2. Reframe Your Value Proposition
Move customer conversations away from technology speeds and feeds and toward business outcomes like:
- Reduced system downtime
- Improved collaboration and communication across teams and locations
- Lower operating costs
- Enhanced customer experiences
This helps your clients see you as a partner in avoiding pain points (downtime, risk, hidden costs) and meeting goals (productivity, growth, compliance), which makes price less of a sticking point. Sell this value for their critical meeting spaces where downtime really costs money. And many competitors in the plug-and-play market (copier dealers, electricians, DIY tech providers, etc.) can’t offer this level of know-how.
3. Invoice for Services, Not Just Hardware
Too many integrators undercharge for their design, project management, and support services. The shift to consumer-grade solutions is a chance to reassert the value of your professional services by putting them front-and-center in every proposal and invoicing appropriately. Consider offering design services that allow you to charge for a system design and provide deliverables like drawings, bills of material, and scope of work that can be used for bid purposes (hopefully not required).
If the customer goes with your design, then you can credit the amount spent on design services to the project costs.
4. Become a Master Systems Integrator
The acceleration of simple, interconnected device deployment means you are uniquely positioned to become a master systems integrator. By integrating AV with security, paging, access, and IoT, for example, you can own the consolidated supplier relationship that clients are starting to demand as they seek out a company that can take sole responsibility for all their tech systems.
Your Long-Term Play
While consumer creep requires integrators to adapt, it also provides the spark for transformation, innovation, and renewed growth.
By meeting clients with clear options, selling outcomes instead of complexity, and providing trusted guidance every step of the way, you can not only weather the disruption but secure an essential role supporting your clients’ success for years to come.
This article was written by members of NSCA’s Emerging Technologies Committee.
