How & Why did we build a Help Center for Nestaway?
Engineers for India
Problem
Nestaway is a managed home rental platform where we handhold tenants & owners through their entire rental journey — from house-finding to move-in to move out for tenants and house listing to rent payments to de-listing for owners. These journeys usually span a long period of time. So naturally, our customers get a lot of questions on a variety of things such as rent, late payments, service costs, utilities, move out charges etc. and for each of them, they contact us via various means.
We noticed that the contacts/ customer increased 20% QoQ because of which we had to increase of support operations proportionately with scale. While this had a cost implication, it also impacted experience since scaling any manual process has its limitations w.r.t consistency. The general ideology in customer support has always been how to train staff better, how to do resolution faster and so on. We took one step back and thought why can’t we start by reducing the number of tickets in the first place. Maybe our users can get answers themselves or we can automate some resolutions — thus Knowledge Base was born.
Solution
Here is a video on the solution and impact of this project:
Impact
- Immediately after the Knowledge Base went live, we saw a 26% dip in the number of contacts/customers.
- With the feedback coming in from KB from unhelpful answers and new tickets, it shed light on some fundamental flows we must re-think and make the experience better for our users.
- 20–25% of all incoming tickets need either no manual intervention (inquiries, offering queries) or requested we didn’t want to entertain (fine waiver, bill payment requests)
- Very few owners were using their dashboards earlier and always used to reach out to us for everything. By pushing them to use the dashboard alone via Knowledgebase, we observed a 30% reduction in tickets.
Engineers for India
It’s said that you need a “large problem” and a “scalable solution” to build a successful venture. A random survey between your friends and family would reveal, that finding and living in a rental home in India could possibly be one of the largest such problems in India, maybe next only to traffic and water. According to the Indian Economic survey, our annual migration rate is about 10 million people every year, which directly flows into the rental market. Then why is that even after it being such a big apparent problem, no one has hit upon a “scalable solution”?
It’s because its a “hard problem”. There is hardly a business template in the world that can be applied, even in small parts, to the unorganized, Non-standardized and often unscrupulous world of the Indian rental market. Any first level solutions dig out more problems and angles that need to be thought through. No amount of capital can solve for ground-level issues of stereotyping and discrimination. As the rental home is a product that almost every Indian consumes, the heterogeneous nature of Indian consumer interest creeps into the nature of demand and supply. Weak dispute resolution mechanisms ensure that a large part of the available inventory remains locked up while large sections of the population lives in sub-standard housing.
At NestAway, we have stayed with this “hard problem”. In our journey starting from 2015, we have been solving the problem that most of us can relate to. Our engineering teams have never had to deal with the problem of context, unlike engineers working for problems disconnected from their world. Our problems are apparent, the solutions are not. We need you to help us.
Based on the data of millions of transactions executed by us; these are complex problems and would test you out both from the perspective of your approach to problem-solving & how to use technology to solve for India. For this, calling Engineers/Designers/Product Managers for India. We are looking for engineers, designers and product managers who love to tackle hard problems. If you think it’s you, check out our open positions: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/?f_C=9334060
