Rewarding on-time rent payments
Engineers for India
Problem
Your salary hits your account in the last week of the month and a large portion of it goes away as rent in the first week of following month, making rent payment, a very unhappy event. We wanted to introduce an element of fun to this activity and a way to reward our tenants who pay on time. We wanted to build something that would drive the behaviour of making rent payments on time.
Solution
We all love UPI apps. People look forward to making UPI payments on GPay or PhonePe or CRED primarily for the scratch cards or the dip cards they get post payment. These apps made it interesting to see what reward a user gets either by letting the user scratch a card or dip a card in some cool hi-tech thingy. We wanted to take these principles and build a unique interaction and not copy the existing ones. Since our use case is rent related, we got inspiration from the popular monopoly board game where users roll a dice and buy/rent properties. We built a digital version of the same!
We offered two types of rewards. One — credits which can be used for next month rent payments and Two — third party offers like Paytm Bus coupons, Zee5 subscriptions etc. We managed to do all of this from our customer experience monthly budget.
This feature was built in a record time (in just about 2 weeks) with great collaboration between product, design, tech, finance and customer experience teams.
Impact
Post this feature, we observed a 2% increase in on-time rent payment in the successive months. We’ve also seen our NPS scores, which we take post rent payments, improve post the release of this feature. We also got great reviews from our tenant base who got rewarded for their largest monthly expenditure. We’ll also be measuring the impact of this module of the avg. stay duration at Nestaway as a long term success metric.
We’ll now take this as a framework to incentivise good behaviour and a lever to increase the avg. stay duration at Nestaway.
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. If you think it’s you, check out our open positions.
