How Affinity Maximizes your AV Installation

Audiovisual (AV) technology enables interactive, collaborative and immersive experiences. Venues, workplaces, city districts and museums deploy these sensory and captivating experiences requiring advanced AV solutions. After installation, these projects require consistent and regular support and maintenance, which isn’t always something a facility can facilitate. To meet this need, we developed Affinity On-Site Support Services by Electrosonic.

With the support of on-site experts, organizations may see a significant return on investment (ROI). evaluate the potential financial impact of Affinity, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ study to evaluate the impact on an organization’s operations. The overall findings for a composite organization included a 139% ROI and $399k Net Present Value over three years!

So, what’s behind this number? Find out how Affinity improved AV system availability, reduced time spent on maintaining AV systems, and more.

What Is Affinity?

Affinity is an on-site managed AV support services offering. The support and maintenance of your AV installation are no longer on your plate. On-site support is customizable to a client’s needs, including AV engineering expertise, on-site staffing, field service, preventative maintenance, service helpdesk, event support and equipment coverage. 

These trusted advisors integrate seamlessly with your creative, IT and maintenance teams. With experts overseeing your AV installation, you can realize many benefits, many of which have a quantifiable ROI. So, how do you quantify a program such as this? The TEI study defines this based on data, user interviews, case studies and more to calculate the total potential financial impact on an organization’s operations. 

The Benefits of Affinity

Affinity delivers a host of benefits for organizations that leverage it. Let’s look at those with some data points from the TEI of Affinity study. 

Improving AV System Availability

Downtime can be a financial disaster for AV installations. With Affinity, on-site engineers perform system checks and maintenance. These activities include ensuring availability, proactive monitoring, room checks, resolving any faults by helpdesk or on-site break-fix and keeping system software and firmware up to date. These tasks help reduce the chance of downtime. 

In the TEI of Affinity study, those interviewed said that they dealt with regular downtime before becoming Affinity customers, which hindered daily operations. The reasons for this included a lack of systems integration and AV specialists to correct the errors. Once they started the Affinity program, the occurrence of downtime declined. 

Reducing IT Burdens

With Affinity, you can reduce the burden of management of AV on IT. That allows those staff to focus on your business systems. Putting this responsibility on outsourced experts can increase adoption and reduce support tickets with end-user training. 

Enabling Better Planning and Collaboration

Another key benefit of Affinity is the framework for more streamlined planning and collaboration. In quantifying this, you’d need to consider all the meeting hours that go into this now. How productive are they? Is there significant time wasted? 

Based on the findings and responses from interviewed organizations that use Affinity, the composite organization saw a reduction in these meetings and greater productivity worth a total cost reduction of $95,000 over three years. 

Delivering a Better User Experience

Affinity puts our engineers in a position to educate and train users. With this level of learning, the experience is better, which creates more confident users. 

More Benefits of Affinity

There are even more ways that Affinity makes an impact. It can optimize brand image by enhancing the ability to keep pace with and surpass competitors’ technology innovation. 

Another major impact of Affinity is the ability to leverage data for decision-making. Employees surveyed found they had better access to data and could collaboratively make determinations that saved time. 

These numbers and improvements are significant, but what does Affinity look like in the real world? Let’s look at recent projects that included this program.

Affinity Projects Drive ROI

Here’s a look inside Affinity deployments for some of the most exciting immersive experiences. 

The Illuminarium Leverages Custom On-Site Support

Illuminarium is a 30,000-square-foot space home to multi-sensory installations using the world’s most advanced projection, audio and control systems. Because of its scale and complexity, the venue requires expertise to maintain the infrastructure. Thus, Affinity was a great fit to support the project post-launch. 

The on-site team keeps AV installations running strong. They manage proactive maintenance, daily system checks, program diagnosis and resolution and software updates.

Uber’s Headquarters Interactive Lobby Experience Stays Bright with Affinity Support 

The Uber lobby includes a dynamic interactive experience called The Stream. The installation highlights the company’s mission through beams of light in motion, involving more than 2,200 LED strips integrated into acrylic tubes and six Intel RealSense cameras. 

For such a unique and custom solution, the company needed the same custom support for their long-term needs and found that with Affinity. A dedicated on-site service team worked with engineers during installation. As a result, they have deep knowledge of it and can quickly identify and resolve service issues. 

Summit One Vanderbilt Taps Affinity to Ensure the Show Goes On

Summit One Vanderbilt is an observation deck experience like no other. In all, it features 26 spaces, using synchronized audio and lighting effects blended with video and interactivity. We worked as the integrator of systems that required significant customization to bring this vision to life. 

A dedicated on-site technician works at the site and provides preventative maintenance and break-fix support. The technician also conducts daily system checks, quickly identifying and resolving any issues. This support ensures guests get to experience the full-scale impactful show as intended. 

Affinity Solves AV Installation and Management Challenges

Many stakeholders come to the table with immersive projects, and. every step is crucial, from planning and conception to deployment and maintenance. We have the distinction of playing a role in all these phases. 

When a project is live, the work isn’t done. Keeping it stable and available is key to the space’s ability to deliver outstanding guest experiences, the goal of any venue. Affinity furthers our commitment to innovation in the AV industry and supports clients in every way. 

Its benefits are clear, as is the ROI. Read the TEI of Affinity study today to see how Affinity delivered a 139% ROI and $399k Net Present Value over three years.