Digital Training at Urban Company

By – Kushal Singh (Supply, Engineering)

In April 2020, the Indian Government had to impose a nationwide lockdown to slow down the onslaught of Covid-19 in India. To localize Covid’s impact, containment zones were declared and social distancing was imperative (continues till today). It was difficult to predict how long this situation will remain and how severe it can become both on personal and professional grounds.

We were bullish on the surge in demand as soon as lockdown would be lifted. To prepare for it, we continued to onboard and train more professionals.

This was also the time when the Tech team at UC organized Hackathons to think, innovate and build bold and long-term capabilities internally.

Born as a fresh Hackathon idea — Digital Training platform — has now evolved into a sophisticated tool catering to all our digital conferencing needs.

With 1.5 years of Covid, digitization of professional screening, training and retraining has helped us safeguard both our service partners and full-time employees.

Core use-cases of process digitization at Urban Company

1. Screening of Professionals for Onboarding: In the Screening process, service professionals are screened on their soft and hard skills. For e.g., Salon professionals are asked to give a demo of their Threading, Waxing and Haircut skills.
2. Training of Screened Professionals: Urban Company invests heavily in the training of its professionals on three skill-sets namely soft skills, hard skills and app usage. These can range from 1 to 10 days of training schedule.

By building a platform to digitize onboarding process, we have also solved for two other perennial use-cases as below -

1. Retraining post onboarding: With Urban Company’s motto to deliver high quality service at home like never experienced before, we constantly keep on upskilling our partners or refining their skills in areas where they lack as identified through customer feedbacks.
2. Category-wide Webinars: Sending important messages from co-founders or City GMs to a large base of partners, such as new incentive program, high demand during seasons etc.

In all these use-cases, earlier where UC partners were asked to visit our city or Training offices, now they can easily join an online session from their home at their convenience.

Product flow

Event & slot creation -

Step 1 — Create an event of Screening, Training, Retraining or Webinar type.

Step 2 — Create upcoming slots with its capacity for the event Eg. Mon-Frid 9–10AM.

Step 3 — Add users to the event using analytics query, csv uploads or search by phone number.

In-App Slot booking & meeting join nudges -

Step 4 — Users added to an event are nudged to select their preferred slot.

Step 5 — After booking a slot, Partner receives reminders to join the session from the app.

Tech Implementation — Building from a Platform Lens

1. Using Meeting Events, we update attendance for the User against a slot in Slot Users as per the min threshold criteria for the event.

2. Similar to how Slot Id is stored as Ref Id in Meeting table, reference Id for any other use-case can also be stored.

3. There is a separate Calendar Management System, which maintains Trainer’s calendar. Few important fields are — TrainerId, slot_start, slot_end, booked_event_type etc

Above system was conceptualized as a Platform which helped us reuse it for multiple other use-cases, over time and again. Few examples -

• Slot booking for Vaccination camps organized by Urban Company.
• Resolving escalations from Customers & Partners via ad hoc video calling.
• Biz categories with Online consultation feature Eg. Online Fitness, Yoga etc.

Choice for Video Conferencing solution

At Urban Company, we have been using Zoom as the Video conferencing solution. Other options like Agora, MirrorFly, Vonage, BlueJeans etc can also be explored while selecting the platform that works best for your needs.

Experience with Zoom SDK integration

Hereby, listing down a few Pros and Cons of using Zoom platform -

Pros

1.Cost effective:

• Comes with a Free plan which can work best for small organizations or to do a quick POC on the integration.
• — Biz Plan at 18$/month/license. Pay once with unlimited usage, works well at Urban Company since the same Trainer can organize multiple meetings during the course of a month and each Training can have multiple participants. Some of the platforms charge per user / minute pricing which might explode your costs.

2.Account sharing

• Zoom is also being used by our internal teams. Therefore to start with, we just had to increase the number of licenses for the existing Business account.

3.Easy SDK integration

• Android and iOS SDKs can be easily integrated into your apps.

4.Exhaustive list of features

• Screen sharing, Chat, Recordings etc all that we are familiar with. Screen sharing is extensively used by Trainers to present their PPTs and show videos during Training.

5.UI customization

• UI can be customized for white labelling of your interface on apps.

Cons

1.High SDK size ~40MB, which will increase your app size significantly.

2.Android SDK does not support dynamic delivery because of which you can download the sdk on-demand.

3.There is not much development on Web based solutions.

Since pros outweigh the cons, so far we have continued with Zoom. In the future, we plan to move to a web-based solution to keep app size minimal with an equal or lesser cost.

Benefits of Digital Onboarding at Urban Company

The biggest advantage of Digital Onboarding is that it unlocks potential to scale up Supply across verticals, categories and geographies without necessarily increasing Infrastructure, manpower or any other resource. Listing down a few important benefits -

1.Cost saving (Real Estate vs Online cost)

Today Urban Company is operational in ~45 cities in India and 6 cities overseas. With a strong expansion plan this count is bound to grow in future.

Training center cost = 1,50,000 INR / Training center * 51 cities = 76.5 L INR

Zoom account cost = 20 categories * 15 Trainers / category * 18$ * 74 = ~4L INR

That’s a whopping 72.5L monthly and 8.7 Cr yearly saving in Cost :)

Notes -

• With virtual onboarding, each trainer can be utilized for multiple cities in the same slot which reduces Trainer headcount and drives efficiency in the process with concurrency.
• In cities abroad & Mumbai in India, the real estate cost can be much higher than 150K INR. Above numbers are just for representation purposes.

2.Time and Travel cost saving

Professionals need not travel to Training centers for Onboarding anymore which saves their time and travel cost.

3.Automated Attendance Tracking

Using server side events sent by the conferencing platform, we can keep track of attendance at a user x slot level in an automated manner which guarantees 100% accuracy as compared to offline mode with manual tracking.

4.Access to recordings for audits

Online events can be recorded and randomly audited to gauge the efficacy of the Screening and Training process. We have been using it to retrain our Trainers for effective delivery of training.

Some Metrics on Platform Adoption

1.There has been a consistent increase in the number of weekly slots from 20th May : 100 to 21st May : 500 being created in the Event scheduler. This is backed by an increase in adoption of existing and new use-cases among the Business teams.

Graph 1 — w.o.w Unique Slots for online meetings (with run-time > 0)

2. Count of unique Partners booked in above slots on a weekly basis, has increased from 20th May: 1.8k to 21st May: 8k.

PROS_ATTENDED — Joined the session at least once.

PROS_COMPLETED — Attended the session for > 90% duration.

Graph 2 — w.o.w unique Pros booked, attending and completing online meetings

Future scope -

1. Exploring webRTC based solutions for app size reduction.
2. Efforts to increase attendance percentage from 60% to 90%.
3. Process Digitization across categories and geographies for 100% of App and Soft skills’ and major proportion of Hard skills Training.

Kushal Singh is a Director of Engineering at Urban Company. He is skilled in AWS — ECS, Docker, NodeJs, Python, PHP, C++, mongodb, mysql and Hibernate

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