Naren K. Gursahaney
Analyst · Oppenheimer
Sure. On the attrition side, it is a little difficult to compare apples to apples across companies, the one thing I would say specifically to Vivint, they tend to have longer contract terms that we do. So again, you tend to see lower attrition during the initial contract period. And in general, I think they have a younger base than we have. They've gone through some pretty rapid growth there. So they have a larger percentage of their customers that are under that initial contract period. So the age of the base does drive some difference. Regarding the auto pay, I think you're right on the mark. In fact, I'd say well over 80% of our new customers coming on board through our direct channel, as well as our dealer channel, are coming on with some form of auto pay, whether it's credit card or ACH, and that is virtually a requirement. Where you might see us a little bit lower is on the small business side, where again, just the nature of their business would not support that. We have started, as I mentioned in the prepared comments, to be a little bit more aggressive in converting that installed base customer and we've got some special promotions for customers with certain credit card companies that they -- if they move to a credit card auto pay system, they'll participate in some giveaways there, as well as we're piloting now some de-escalations. In return for not escalating a customer, we would expect them to move over to an auto pay if they're getting a monthly or quarterly paper bill right now. So we are continuing to push for more of that. We're just north of 60% in aggregate right now. And we're going to continue both on the new as well as in the installed base and continue to migrate that base up. As far as the usage, again, I agree completely there. We are seeing our Pulse customers being much more engaged with their system, using it more frequently, especially when you move in to the home automation piece, the level of engagement, even increases just over the remote security aspects. And that's why we're continuing to drive Pulse aggressively through all of our channels, and while we're not modeling better attrition in our economics models right now, as we get more data, we'll continue to look at that, but I think we all believe that the attrition for Pulse customers in the long run will be better.