Home Services Industry Steadily Empowering New-Age Indian Consumers Most players in this space are steadily trying to improve product offerings to create a 'single app for all services under one roof'

The demand for platforms that connect people with local services has been increasing consistently in India. Today, there are so many options available online, under home services. Audiences are shedding conservativeness and are starting to warm up to the idea of such services, fulfilling their daily household demands.

The fact that so many well-funded players exist in this market indicates that home services in India are an existing problem. As per recent findings by QuikrServices, the current market size of Indian home services industry is pegged at $100 billion and households in India are spending an average of INR 25000 on home services annually.

Challenges

With all this in the background, the industry still faces some challenges when it comes to getting the supply side online. This involves training required for the service providers to become more organized and efficient. Also, it is a humongous task for technology-based platforms to provide service providers with enough business and therefore constantly innovate to reduce the demand and supply gap.

Opportunities

Despite the challenges, there are plenty of other factors that are playing well for the growth of the services market including growing urban population, increase in disposable income that leads to seeking convenience, the rise in internet penetration, time crunch faced by professionals and new moms.

The Internet no more remains a platform for just gathering information, it has now become a transaction platform and people's reliability on such platforms has increased. Slowly but steadily hyperlocal is proving to be good for supply side as well. The service providers are now able to earn a good income and most importantly they are witnessing dignity of labor. QuikrServices currently has a whopping 250,000 active service providers.

Shift in the Industry with Sole Focus on Consumer Experience

The industry is seeing a shift that seems to have come from the sharpened competitive environment. Most of the players in this space are steadily trying to improve product offerings to create a "single app for all services under one roof' and to gain traffic to their site, heighten their market presence thus hoping to create a national/global footprint.

A lot of thinking has been going into factors like the kind of customers' one wants to serve and the firm's capabilities in terms of delivering value to these customers.

Firms are now well equipped in deciphering what product configurations to offer, what pricing mechanisms to put in order, how to communicate the value of the offerings to the consumers and what channel setup to leverage. As a result, home service providers are now making sure that all aspects of the consumer experience are superior not just for the moment but also when the consumer goes speeding away from the current offerings of the firm. Overall, home services industry is continuously trying to adapt and stay relevant to the consumer.

The Industry is Evolving Based on Consumer Requirements

It is having a presence through apps has only proved to be more meaningful as this lets the consumer avail services as and when desired. The whole purpose of being easily accessible on mobile through apps is for the consumer to experience seamless service satisfaction, which has also led to creating a 360-degree consumer experiential program from downloading apps, logins, service selection, and payment gateways in the front-end to skill and professional etiquette training for technicians, tele-calling to consumer grievance redressed centers in the back-end.

A Long-term Game

The firms in this space have also clearly realized that this is a long-term game and it is all about quality of supply and the service hence they are now strategically focused on curating and onboarding service providers; and factors like quality control, training, on-time delivery etc. are being given more importance. The aim here is to go beyond being a mere search and discovery platform by giving users the assurance of reliable, high quality and quick services. Transparency about pricing, simple and intuitive product and having a huge network of service providers is for sure steadily changing the face of on-demand services in the country.

All this has led to the new age organized and skilled workers getting access to the common man's home essentially due to the ease of service search (app-based), cost benefits and skilled technicians, compared to the open marketplace.

At this juncture, it can be said that several things have changed for good, and are still changing when it comes to catering to consumers through home services in India.