How we vaccinated 70% UC Partners in 1.5 months
By — Akanksha Sharma (Product, Partner Success Team)
At Urban Company, Customer Obsession and creating Win-Win products are our core values. With COVID-19 spreading across the country, safety became the topmost concern for our customers and partners, and hence, for us.
Apart from all the other safety measures that we took, we set a goal to vaccinate 100% of our partners. Looking back, we feel euphoric given we were able to accomplish this, keeping two seemingly incompatible aspects together — speed and quality of delivery. Within just 1.5 months of vaccines being available for 18+ in India (May to June mid), we vaccinated >70% of our active partners, captured vaccination certificates of 100% vaccinated partners and started showing the partner vaccination status and certificate to our customers. As of Aug 2021, we are currently trending towards a 90% vaccinated partner base in India, but the road has had its fair number of bumps and pits.
Booking Vaccination Slots
We all struggled with booking Cowin slots in May because of the low availability of slots. Naturally, we thought that if we send slot notifications to partners as and when slots became available, all partners would be able to book in no time. Right? Wrong. We realised that the Cowin website was non-intuitive, not optimised for mobile and involved multiple steps for slot booking. This meant that getting our semi-tech savvy partners to book a slot within 5 minutes of slot opening was not an easy task. A quick survey of the partners showed that 65% of partners had a high intent on getting vaccinated amongst which 30% were not able to book slots, 20% didn’t know how to book on Cowin and only 15% were able to finally get vaccinated.
We had to help our partners by creating a faster and simplified booking experience. That led to the genesis of our Express Slot Booking Flow. A WebApp was created that interacted with Cowin APIs and automated what a user would do on Cowin using the details that we already had (partner’s phone number and location). The output was a single-step process for the partners where they just had to enter an OTP post clicking a notification to book the earliest, nearest and cheapest slot available in less than 10 seconds.
UC was the first company to launch an end-to-end Express Slot Booking Flow and use it on the scale. It has enabled ~30% of partners to book slots for both doses. Express Slot Booking is completely open sourced and is powered by a WebApp. Any company that wants to vaccinate its employees/service professionals in India can use it for free. You can find it here
Alongside, we also arranged UC vaccination camps across India for Dose 1 and vaccinated 60% partners via them.
35% of partners didn’t want to get vaccinated because of low trust and misinformation about vaccines (20%) or because of the associated health concerns (15%). We facilitated consultation sessions with doctors for our partners and one on one Covid helpline support with Ek Saath (an NGO) to resolve doubts and myths.
Our customers overwhelmingly preferred partners who were vaccinated. We leveraged this to drive a sense of urgency amongst our partners to get vaccinated soon by showing the earning differences between vaccinated and non vaccinated partners.
For all new partners, we made Cowin registration mandatory which increased the % of new partners vaccinated within 7 days of joining from 30% to >70%.
Getting Vaccination Status and Certificates
Capturing the correct vaccination status of all partners and certificates of vaccinated partners was important for us to track our overall vaccinations, reach out to non-vaccinated partners and, most importantly, show the partner’s vaccination status to customers.
Our first few status captures were via a 5-step process using which partners had to upload a screenshot of their Aarogya Setu application. Our fail-fast attitude helped us to wrap up this product as soon as we launched it. It was complex (only 30% of vaccinated partners were able to upload correct screenshots), not scalable (required a manual approval if OCR was not able to map the screenshot details to the partner) and, non-uniform (different sizes of phones lead to different screenshots).
We built an in-house Express Status Capture flow where we could fetch the vaccination status and certificate of the partner directly from Cowin using just an OTP. To choose the correct beneficiary associated with the partner’s phone number, we ran identity matching and fuzzy name matching algorithms. Within 15 days of launch, we were able to capture the vaccination status of 90% active partners and certificates of 100% vaccinated partners without any manual intervention and minimal learning curve for our partners. This is also open-sourced and is available on GitHub. Please check it out here.
Building Customer Trust
The services provided by Urban Company are high touch in nature and require a partner to stay inside the customer’s house for a couple of hours. Making customers comfortable and assured about their safety in such scenarios is very critical. We took a decision to show the overall %vaccinated partner base stats and the vaccination certificates of all its partners on the customer app. For customer safety, we went as far as to show the partner vaccination status to customers before the booking to let them choose only vaccinated partners for their service. We observed that this choice was exercised well by customers with vaccinated partners re-booked 50% more as compared to non-vaccinated partners. This meant taking a risk of losing some of our bookings in the initial stages of our vaccination drive because of the huge demand vs limited capacity of vaccinated partners to serve. Nonetheless, today, with almost 90% of our partner base vaccinated, we are clocking an all-time high number of bookings even in close contact services like Salon exhibiting the value we have created for customers.
Way Forward
We are glad that we were able to stand with our partners and help them in every possible way in this difficult time. Our tight safety protocols and partner vaccinations have given the comfort to our customers to book an Urban Company service without any hesitation.
With Dose 1 vaccination completed for 90% of partners, our focus is now to enable our partners to get fully vaccinated. The tools that we built for the first dose continue to hold us in good stead. 90% of Dose 1 vaccinated partners are getting Dose 2 vaccinated within 3 weeks of their eligibility. 60% of overall dose 2 vaccinations are being done via our express slot booking flow that is enabling partners to book the slots in a super easy and super-fast manner.
To close, here’s some Twitter love we gathered from our Service Partners ❤
And, of course, our Customers❤
About the author
Akanksha is a product manager in the Partner Success team. She loves adventure sports (especially trekking), painting, dancing, playing piano and making others uncomfortable with her lousy humour.
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