Savant Launches Virtual Tours of New York Showroom as Dealer Education Tool

Amid persistent COVID-19 travel restrictions, Savant created a virtual tour of its New York Experience Center as a way for dealers to educate clients and designers about benefits of home control, lighting design and audio/video systems, said Angie Larson, vice president-sales operations, on a Wednesday video call.

Digital visits let the company handle far more tours, expanding on the “hundreds” it holds per year at the 8,000-square-foot space in the SoHo section of Manhattan. Using the virtual platform, the control company has tripled the number of tours it can accommodate, attracting “an audience from all over the globe,” Larson told us.

Savant’s TrueImage technology, used in its smartphone app, powers real-time changes inside the showroom, remotely, giving dealers a way to demonstrate technology to clients, designers, architects and builders in a showroom setting. “We’re trying to give dealers a resource when many of them can’t open their own showrooms,” Larson said. The company hopes the virtual technology can “change education away from that Keynote slide voiceover model.” A Long Island, New York, dealer says the experience was "just like being there," Larson said. It also allows the company to open tours to international dealers.

The virtual tour starts at the spot where guests come off the elevator in the expansive experience center, which has a conference room, a bar/entertainment area and lifestyle sections depicting a living room, kitchen and home office. Demo sections show Savant keypad, controller and speaker options. “We’ve been able to three-dimensionally model everything that’s in there," said Blair Piersall, sales vice president. Before the demo, guests are taken into the sports bar area to talk about how to use control system features. The tour's goal is to give the design community and potential clients a feeling of “exactly what it’s like to have a Savant home” and to create the sense of a “lived-in system,” he said.

Recent additions to the space are USAI full-color recessed lighting fixtures, complementary in-ceiling Micro Aperture speakers and energy management systems. Energy has become a next-generation category Savant encourages dealers to talk about “because there’s a real problem with the grid,” Piersall said. Consumers are experiencing “instability” throughout the country; Savant solutions enable clients to have more “energy independence,” he said.

The virtual tour software allows the company to take customers deeper into features and products they want to know more about. Visitors who click on a dot in the room representation can get more information about lighting products, for instance, via embedded videos that help further educate visitors about products and the Savant user experience “that, no matter how well I explain them, are tough to understand, said Piersall.

He clicked on a video to show how a client can set up daylight mode inside the app for wellness lighting. “We haven’t left the virtual demonstration space,” he said, “but we’ve moved into an app preview showing how we … can make adjustments to two curves that drive the circadian lighting experience." Potential clients can see how they would have personalized control over "what a wellness-oriented lighting solution will look like inside their home.”

Dealers can go into their portal and register for a time slot to bring themselves and their clients into the virtual tour. A Savant host conducts the tour. Larson said the virtual tour will change how Savant educates the design community: “This has a lot of power to show someone what smart living is like.” Savant is getting the tour certified with the American Institute of Architects, she said.