HIVE: Helping People To "Get Living"

You’re working late and worried about your newly licensed teen driving herself home from school. Then your phone pings with a notification that your child has just pulled into your home driveway. Ahhh.

This peace of mind, control, and comfort is what Hive, a leader in smart home technology, is all about.

Most Hive customers likely aren’t concerned with the fact that the connected home market is predicted to be worth £117B globally by 2020 (according to PwC). And that’s fine. Hive customers don’t need to care about the internet of things as a concept and industry. They just want their daily lives to be made easier.

Towards this end, Hive delivers a wide variety of accessible and affordable smart home products and services. “Let’s get living” isn’t just a marketing slogan flashing across the home page of www.hive.com. It’s a vision that serves as the foundation for everything that Hive provides.

Hive (whose British parent is the multinational utility Centrica, which also owns British Gas) launched in 2013 with a smart thermostat. Since
launch, they’ve displayed year-on-year growth and expanded their offering to encompass a suite of smart products intended to adapt to their
customers’ lifestyles. The Hive smart home brand has installed more than 660,000 smart home hubs and sold more than one million products.

In 2017, Centrica Connected Home launched its first Hive subscription service, Hive Welcome Home., which packages a selection of its core product line with its most essential services to build a series of Hive Actions triggering heating, lighting, and electronic functions. Hive Welcome Home costs just £5.99 a month in the UK and comes with Hive Active Light bulbs, a Motion Sensor, one Hive Active Plug and the Hive hub which connects to a router acting as a central control unit.

“The key benefit of connected home services is that they give you the ability to live your life and enjoy experiences supported by truly intuitive technology. Hive is the next logical step in home utilities, to turn the home into an even more comfortable, secure and valued place for consumers,” said Jo Cox, Commercial Director of Hive.

Hive customers are in control of their smart homes. And this control extends to how Hive customers manage their subscriptions. Hive offers a “bolted on” services model and self-service system, through which subscribers can scale up their connected services when and how they need to, with sign-ups, upgrades, and downgrades.

“We are trying to move the market.” says Roy Vella, Centrica Connected Home VP. “The market as it stands is about buying equipment…Hive is much more about service provisioning and the constituent parts of our subscription plan.”

Hive is now set on bringing their holistic experience to global markets, as evidenced by the fact that Centrica has invested close to $650M in an initiative to launch Hive in North America.

The promise of the Subscription Economy is to transform the way consumers live their everyday lives. Hive is indeed delivering on that promise with services that provide security, comfort, and delight.

Learn how Zuora is helping IoT companies such as Hive succeed in the Subscription Economy. And continue reading other inspiring stories in the latest issue of Subscribed Magazine!

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