Receiving a cleaning

After a customer books a recurring cleaning or handyman service, the person closes the app and waits for their scheduled appointment. Sometimes, it can be weeks before their booking arrives. On the day of the service, there's a lot of fear of the unknown. Who is my cleaner? Will my cleaner show up? On time? What specifically do they clean? Do I have to tell them to clean the things I want? Do I need to be home and watch them the whole time? Will they steal from me? Should I tip? How much? What do I do if they don't show up or I have a problem?

Goal

85% of customer inbound was about the current cleaning in the last 24hrs. The goal of this project was to tackle the questions a person has about the day of service and resolve the issues in app to keep customer inbound costs down.

Restraints

Some restraints around building a marketplace is that we, as the middle man, are unable to train our cleaners because they are contractors. We can not tell them to go to the job. It is on their own conscience to do a good job and show up. However, if the pro doesn't live up to expectations, Handy gets the complaint and loses the customers money. When receiving complaints, whose to say who is right? Without proper understanding of what happens offline, we can't know for sure if the pro or the customer is gaming the system. 

Since we were already tracking the cleaner (see work), we were now able to leverage this information and provide live updates for the customer. We built an experience that gave some insight into the pros journey. We let a customer track their pro from on the way to job, during the job, and as it is completed. We send them information like: your pro is on the way, your pro is checked in, or your pro is 15 minutes late, etc.

Execution

Since we are able to understand a cleaners timeline, we are able to fix a customers problems before they happen. We don't want to penalize a pro for being late if a customer doesn't mind. So, being proactive but not preemptive was our goal. We wanted to create a simple experience for a customer to easily report their issue, if they wanted too.

There were 2 places customers were reporting issues: on the booking details and in the help center. We wanted to continue to let them do this in both places, but provide a clear place in the help center that was different than an FAQ. We worked through distinguishing help actions from help content.

On the booking details, we wanted to show the information but provided a bit of friction when reporting it. We won't let the customer report a pro is late before the booking time, or that they left early if we tracked the pro leaving less than 5 mins early. This let us be smarter about how we solved issues in real time. 

This project has helped resolve multiple issues within the app. It has allowed us to be smarter when solving the problems and drive cost to complete an issue down. We receive less basic problems to solve because customers can solve them on their own.