ServiceGuy Update
July 29, 2008
It has been a hot summer for ServiceGuy. You might not have noticed, but we have more than doubled in size (so much so Mike had to create two columns on the city selector). In the last two weeks we have added Sacramento and St. Louis to a total of 22 cities including: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle, Silicon Valley, St. Louis and Washington DC.
Of course it isn’t all roses. We are struggling to fill the contractor ranks in the new cities with quality individuals. The biggest problem with a downturn in the economy for our business is the explosion in people looking for side jobs. Many of these people are great, but there are a growing number of unqualified and sometimes unscrupulous people looking for work. Keeping them out of the system is a challenge and it has the negative effect of slowing down contractor recruitment. Here are two strategies we are using:
Step One: Focus on inviting the best people. Our people utilize other contractor referral systems and advertisements to recruit people who ‘appear’ to be qualified.
Step Two: Track feedback and start building reputation scores for contractors already in the system. By calling each ‘consumer/client’ who was connected to a contractor (one to four weeks after their call) and asking for a rating (1 scam artist, 2 unqualified but honest, 3 average, 4 good, 5-9 great result) we can eliminate bad contractors and promote goods ones. Anyone with a 1 is immediately suspended from the system pending review by our team (i.e. we can a) listen to their call with the client, b) contact both the client and the contractor and c) determine if we want to ban or rehabilitate the contractor.
The downside is that this reputation management has reduced the number of contractors called in each city and makes new recruitment even slower. The solution? Throw more recruiters in the mix. We plan to grow our contractor recruiting staff by 60% by this fall. Hopefully this will make ServiceGuy even better!
