ET Bureau Aug 6, 2015, 04.00AM IST
By Shashwati Shankar & Evelyn Fok
MUMBAI/BENGALURU: Rema Menon, a housewife in suburban Mumbai, is used to personally training three to four helpers to ensure her Juhu beach apartment is spick and span. However, when she recently hired last-minute professional help a day before a dinner party through a mobile application to have her sofa cushions cleaned, she found a great difference in terms of quality.
"There's potential for these on demand services to pick up--they're convenient, time-saving, and topnotch in terms of quality. But one can never really tell how safe it is to have unknown servicemen come in," said Menon. "As long as these on-demand home services can guarantee safety, consumers wouldn't mind."
Home services platforms operate on marketplace models where professionals of all stripes are invited to enter customers' homes. If security and verification issues aren't adequately addressed, this could represent a disaster waiting to happen.
LocalOye, backed by Tiger Global and Lightspeed, tests professional partners on 45 parameters and verifies them on the Aadhaar database before signing them up.
Similarly, Bengaluru-based Qyk judges vendors on their portfolio and client feedback, which it grades on an internal quality system. Housejoy, backed by Matrix Partners, puts potential providers through a two- to three-hour assessment process at its centre, where they are graded on the quality of the work they do.
"A very important thing is quality," said Aditya Rao, LocalOye's founder and CEO. "When it comes to service, the human element is involved."
Meanwhile, several on-demand service startups in this space outsource this time-consuming, human-intensive process to third-party agencies such as IDfy and InstaVeritas. According to IDfy CEO Ashok Hariharan, by efficiently making use of technology to automate manual interventions such as checking court records, the time taken is cut down by 70%.
"The foundation of any verification check is to establish the authenticity of the identity card. Almost 25-30% of identity cards are fake in India," said Nikhil Mulchandani, founder of InstaVeritas, whose clients include Zimmber, Mr. Homecare, and Urbanclap. After identity, the next step involves a current and a permanent address check, since most migrant workers shift locations frequently. This is followed by a court record check, which involves filtering through the database of district courts, high courts and the Supreme Court.