One of the perennial discussions we have at Klevio is about how best to describe ourselves.  There’s still no simple answer to the question ‘what is Klevio?’ and it continues to give our marketing team sleepless nights.

Because although Klevio is similar to other types of products that people are more familiar with, we’re not the same as them. And those differences are important – it’s what we believe makes us better than any of our closest competitors.

So if you spoke to any member of the Klevio team for three minutes and asked them to tell you what Klevio is, how it works and why it’s better than anything else out there, I’d wager all of us could do a pretty convincing job.

But the problem is we seldom get three minutes. We usually get about three seconds.

So for a while now, we’ve been describing Klevio as a smart intercom. And in many ways this makes a lot of sense. It helps explain that we work in buildings where you need to unlock communal and private doors. And it explains that Klevio isn’t just an app – it’s an app and a device and that device works just like an intercom. You can speak to people outside through it and use it to buzz in visitors.

But describing it like this also has its limitations. For a start, only people who live in flats have intercoms, but Klevio works for houses with single front doors too. And even flat-dwellers with intercoms don’t always call them that – they tend to call them buzzers or entryphones, but our device quite intentionally doesn’t look like a typical entryphone.  

Aye, there’s the rub: which brings us to smart locks.

Until now, we have deliberately resisted calling Klevio a smart lock because it’s not an accurate description. Not only is Klevio not actually a lock at all, but it’s also better than a smart lock in three important ways:  

Firstly, if you install a smart lock, you’ll not only have to change your existing lock but your keys too, whereas with Klevio – which is entirely retrofit – you can keep both.  This is a really important benefit for many of our customers.

Secondly, smart locks only work on a single door. If you live in an apartment, it’s all very well installing a smart lock on your private door, but how are you going share digital keys for your communal door, or let people in remotely?  The answer is that you can’t, unless you have Klevio. Ours is the only product that enables you to do this – there simply isn’t a smart lock out there that can open more than one door.

Finally, you have to install smart locks yourself, which can be complicated, time-consuming and messy. But with Klevio, our professional team of installers do all the hard work for you, so there’s no chance of wasting money on a product that you then can’t work out how to fit.

But at least people have actually heard of smart locks and, crucially for us, might be searching for smart locks online with a view to buying one. So we’ve decided to start addressing this conundrum head-on, because the reality is that we are like a smart lock; just different in some important ways that actually make us a lot better.

So from now on, you’ll hear us talking more about how Klevio is like a smart lock, only smarter.  We hope this comparison will not only help people grasp the kind of product we are more quickly, but increase their chance of finding Klevio when they’re looking for smart locks online.  

As ever – we’re curious to hear your thoughts: do do you think of us as a smart intercom, a smart lock or something else entirely? What were you searching for when you first found us and how do you describe us to other people? Please tell us what you think and who knows – if you can do a better job of solving this riddle then perhaps our poor marketing team might get a good night’s sleep.