How Exotel is helping Urban Company organise the service market

Case Study

How Exotel is helping Urban Company organise the service market

About Urban Company

Urban Company (formerly UrbanClap) is India’s largest home services marketplace. Launched in 2014, the platform helps customers hire trusted professionals like beauticians, electricians, plumbers, etc. without any middlemen. It provides multiple services on its platform and facilitates around 7,00,000 services every month in 18 different cities. It also has over 25,000 hand-picked professionals on the platform. In addition to India, Urban Company is live in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Australia and Singapore.

Implemented Use Cases

Challenges in the services sector

Finding qualified services professionals in India was always a prevalent problem. This was primarily because of the unorganized nature of the sector where word of mouth was the only way of functioning. However, UC took it upon itself to bring order to the household services market. The first step towards this was to handpick professionals and make them available on a single platform.

Connecting professionals and customers is at the core of Urban Company’s business. Hence, a major challenge for Urban Company was to ensure the safety of both customers and partners. They also wanted to ensure that there was minimal disruption once the job was assigned to the partner.

Challenge
Safeguarding the privacy of customers and service partners

Solution: Number masking to safeguard privacy

Connecting customers with service partners is at the core of Urban Company’s business. And the company takes a lot of care to ensure the safety of both the parties involved. Since phone numbers are essential for both parties to connect with each other, a system that could protect their privacy and also track conversations was required. This needed to be accomplished whilst keeping the communication process simple for customers.

Hence, number masking is enabled for both the partner and the customer via the Urban Company app. When the partner clicks on the call button, he is connected to the customer via a virtual number. This number is dynamically allocated for the duration of the service.

Customers also receive this number from UC when a service partner is assigned.

We are proud to have a partner that understands our business and proactively recommends solutions to improve our communication experience. I’m also amazed by the resolution time in cases of escalations.
Mayur Garg
Lead Software Developer

Challenge
Minimal disruptions in the job assigned

Solution: Task Rescheduling Confirmation through Automated IVR Calls

Seamless customer experience is one of Urban Company’s primary goals. In cases where a service is rescheduled, Urban Company wanted a method to ensure that the customer requested it.

So when a professional reschedules a task, an automatic IVR call is triggered. The customer has to confirm over IVR by picking the right option. In case the rescheduling wasn’t requested by the customer, a ticket is generated and the booking team furthers investigates the incident. This allows for better customer experience.

We’ve been using Exotel as a communication platform for the past 3 years. Exotel’s call masking solution has been reliable and crucial in supporting our need for user privacy. I enjoy using Exotel’s call apps which are customizable to support complex use cases too.
Anish Rao
Associate VP of Product, Urban Company