Enabling platform stickiness through rebooking

By —Sujit Emmanuel (Product Manager, Marketplace)

At UC, one of the seven core values and probably one of my most favourite ones is Win-Win. Win-Win means to champion the voice of all stakeholders, be it customers, service professionals, internal team or others. It means thinking of solutions which help everyone win together.

One instance of this started with a casual interaction with one of our haircut professionals, Ratish. During this catchup, he mentioned that one of the key issues he faces is that his repeat customers are unable to book the service with him. “Sir they keep calling me to check for slots and availability and say that my slots aren’t free” He encouraged me to do something about this, so I dug deeper and found a few interesting patterns.

The Problem: The crux of the problem was fundamental to demand-supply, i.e., a partner and customer who want to do business together should be able to do so at a convenient slot. On an average, almost half of the near term slots would be already blocked for these customers. In other words, while UC ensures any quality partner will be available in a free slot, if a customer is keen on availing services from a particular partner, it gets harder and harder closer to the service slot, as most of the partners get booked up early. This was not an ideal experience for a variety of reasons:

• Customers: They have to choose between their preferred partner and convenient time slot. If they can’t find the right slots with their preferred partner, some try multiple times in a day.
• Professionals: They value their repeat customers highly — and want to provide better service to their repeat customers (think lifetime value and safety). They enjoyed working with these customers.
• UC: By not enabling this rebooking need, both parties fell back to phone number exchanges and services being taken off-platform. This is not only demand loss for UC, but also a safety concern

So at its core, the lack of slots for preferred partners was preventing a win-win proposition for pros and customers.

So, why was this happening? We found out that there were 4 major reasons which were leading to slots not being available:

• Hesitancy to meet new customers in some time slots: This was a leading cause in women-led categories where professionals found it unsafe to work in late evenings at a new customer’s place. While daytime hours were better suited for new customers, late evening slots were not necessarily viewed with the same level of comfort and confidence. however, professionals were more comfortable with servicing repeat customers in these timeslots because of the familiarity with location and customer.
• On leave: Professionals were blocking some time slots as on-leave either for personal work or for taking some time off. While this is a necessity, we found that professionals were elastic when it came to the needs of their past customers
• Busy with other jobs: They had accepted some other jobs in these slots
• Blocked due to travel constraints: We had configured a minimum time for a person to reach a customer’s location in the system (in some cases this was upto 3 hours)

Should we address it? As a neutral marketplace, one of the decision points for us was whether we should encourage preferred partner-customer pairings, or encourage random pairings? Our view was we should build a win-win marketplace: Do what is best suited for both partners and customers. In the offline world as well we see this behavior of customers availing services from the same professionals repeatedly. Win-win being a core value of business at UC, it made sense for us to enable customers and partners who know each other to do business as much as possible.

So, what did we do? We decided to attack all these reasons and took an ambitious target to reduce slots being not available to less than 20% for rebooking cases. Some of the targeted interventions were

• Partner opt-in to send repeat requests in leave-slots: Partners could now select if they wanted to get repeat requests or not in these leave slots. We kept full-day offs out of this opt-in as these are cases where a person had some emergency at home or had to go out of station. Interestingly, the majority of partners organically signed up for this program.
• Reserving slots for rebooking: System led reservation of a few hours on the calendar for tomorrow for rebooking jobs. We would then release these slots with sufficient time to spare, if they remained unfilled. Idea was, give priority for repeat customers, but if they are not availing the slots, free up the time for new customers
• Reduced time constraints: This was a no brainer, we showed earlier slots to customers for rebooking as professional already knows the customer & location

Impact: Results were instantaneous. Slots being unavailable were reduced by ~20 percentage points and thereby,

• Higher rebooking conversions for repeat customers
• Better outcome metrics such as ratings and NPS

Overall, leading to win-win-win situation across our customers, our partner professionals and UC

About the Authors:

A mechanical engineer by training, Sujit is always interested in learning and sharing about how to build profitable and efficient products and businesses. Sujit definitely believes in working hard and partying even harder.

A true engineer at heart, with more than a decade of experience crafting highly scalable, intelligent systems as a tech leader. Outside of work Ananda is quite popular for his wildlife photography and quick wittedness.

Sounds like fun?
If you enjoyed this blog post, please clap 👏(as many times as you like) and follow us (@UC Blogger). Help us build a community by sharing on your favourite social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc).

If you are interested in finding out about opportunities, visit us at http://careers.urbancompany.com