Gearing for a Tough Race
As home services startups
accelerate from taking baby steps to maturity beyond their years, J Vignesh
takes a peek into how they are gearing up for 2016
Sarabjeet Kaur, an employee
with a horticulture company in Mumbai, wanted her geyser fixed but did not know
any electrician, until she heard of Taskbob, a home services startup which
connects customers and service providers through a mobile application. Kaur's
problem was fixed in quick time, once she registered for the service.
However a lot of work goes
on in the background to ensure that such service is delivered. The initial
challenge being to convince servicemen like plumbers and electricians and
carpenters of the benefits of working with unknown digital entities.
Amit Kumar, chief operating
officer of Mumbai-based Zimmber, recounted how he with his cofounders Gaurav
Shrivastava and Anubhab Goel went to the many housing colonies in Mumbai
searching for servicemen. “We sat, interacted and had tea with the servicemen
and their families so that we could understand their psychology. We wanted to
connect with them and know their aspirations,“ he said.
They urged the servicemen
to attend a workshop, bringing along their associates, to be inducted into
Zimmber. Six turned up. Kumar and team kept repeating the exercise, and each
workshop had more servicemen coming in. Presently, the platform employs close
to 700 servicemen, whom it calls `champs'.
After spending much of last
year hiring or aggregating handymen and putting rudimentary systems in
place-for background screening, training, acquiring customers--the startups
will be focused this year on solidifying their business structures, and staying
alive.“The sector was a small baby in 2015, now maturity will come in,“ said
Aditya Rao, founder and CEO of Tiger Globalbacked LocalOye.
An important aspect of
`maturing' is ensuring consistent service quality, easier said than done when
that involves managing thousands of blue-collar workers. In other words,
execution--the bane of Indian startups--has to be topnotch. Startups also have
to be able to convince more customers that it is not only convenient to use
their services, but also safe to allow their men into their homes. Towards this,
a lot of planning is underway.
Services startups are
striving hard to put in robust systems, first to get the right people onboard.
They are engaging background verification companies to whet scores of handymen,
and conducting core skills tests, face-to-face interviews and behavioral tests.
After induction, the servicemen undertake training in soft skills--how to speak
with customers, be on time, be wellgroomed.
Housejoy plans to get
established brands to train their service providers, such as bathroom fittings
maker Jaguar to train their plumbers on the best way to fix a faucet. “We are
also planning to have customised training modules for our service providers.
Much of quality is also on reaffirmation of processes.We need to keep stressing
on how to do a particular job. We would feel extremely satisfied if we ensure
that 100 percent of our servicemen reach the homes of the customers at the
exact said time,“ said Saran Chatterjee, CEO of Housejoy, which recently raised
`150 crore funding led by Amazon India.
Feedback ensures
underperforming servicemen are weeded out. “If a serviceman gets less than a
three-star rating for more than three times, he she is delisted immediately,“
said LocaOye's Rao.
Several home services
companies have become prominent in the past year, grabbing the attention of
investors and customers by stitching together a highly-fragmented market pegged
at close to $100 billion (`6.6 lakh crore) in India.But the space has become
hotly contested and is set for a round of consolidation, sparing not more than
two-three large companies. Which means the startups have to rush headfirst into
a maturing phase to sustain.
“How do you focus on
consistent customer experience? How do you differentiate the service of one
brand from another? What is the customer experience differentiator and how do
you define quality, what goes into it? The one who answers this quickly will be
the winner,“ said Prateek Srivastava, founder and CEO of Basil Advisors.
Srivastava also said
monetization will have to become more intelligent, maybe by allowing
established brands associate with these home services startups to get closer to
customers.
“We saw lots of companies
come up in the services sector in the last 12 months, mostly seed-funded.
However, since not a lot of series-A financing is happening and funds are
pulling back, this year I anticipate a bunch of startups shutting down,“ said
Mukul Singhal of venture capital firm SAIF Partners, which as backed UrbanClap.
“Companies that have reached critical mass of financing and scale will lead
some amount of consolidation. It will be a good way to expand teams and (fix)
product gaps.“
The startups are in a rush.
“This year, we want to reach 10 times the number of customers,“ said Varun
Khaitan, cofounder of UrbanClap. “We are also improving our speed of service to
truly become `on-demand'. For example, a customer presently has to wait for two
hours to get an electrician. We want to bring it down to half an hour. We also
want to aim for a `round-the-clock' model.“
Many also want to expand
beyond Mumbai, Delhi-National Capital Region, Bengaluru and Pune, increase the
number of services to meet a customer's every need. This would ensure that
these startups do not go down the way of USbased on-demand housecleaning
startup HomeJoy, which shuttered in July.
ET8JAN16
No comments:
Post a Comment