Coordinating the Crowd

Introduction
Established in 2014, UrbanClap is amongst the largest mobile services marketplace in India.
It is a two-sided marketplace connecting consumers to service providers. It provides services
such as salon, maintenance, homecare, repair, design, cleaning, pest control, business
services, packers & movers, event management, health & wellness, etc. It has developed a
coterie of more than one lakh skilled and trained professionals including. The coterie
consists of varied roles beauticians, electricians, photographers, plumbers, artists, DJs,
chartered accountants (CAs), etc. Aimed at creating a technology-based solution to
customer needs in the country, the primary focus revolves around local services in the
industry. UrbanClap provides a high level of engagement and it is pivotal for the platform to
tap into the right needs of both the customer and the professionals onboarded. Their
business model includes on-boarding and training of the service providers, with the key
objective of providing standardized & affordable quality services at home.

RATER Analysis of UrbanClap’s Service Quality

Reliability
Urban clap promises to have over 25,000 trained professionals located across 17 cities. In
terms of service providing, reliability encompasses the ability to perform the promised
service in a dependable and accurate way. It also means that the company must deliver
their promises with regards to service provision, pricing, and grievance redressal. As a
service provider Urban Clap needs to focus on both the customer and the service
Case Analysis “UrbanClap: Marketplace
providers. In addition, there exists a constant need for them to differentiate themselves
from platforms like Yellow Pages and Just Dial who provide similar services and function in
for On-demand Services(A)”
the same space.

Assurance
By Assurance
Group 5in the service industry requires gaining customers confidence and instilling
trust with respect to the brand in the customer’s mind. Urban Clap only hires
professionals whose background they have verified to instill trust amongst their users.
They have also hired a retired superintendent of Police to supervise this job.

Responsiveness
Responsiveness involves providing a prompt service to the customers and the willingness
Adithi
to Das
help customers avail the best service possible. It requires promptness and
attentiveness when it comes to dealing with customer questions, complaints, problems,
Aastha Dhiman
and any requests. Urban Clap has the option of chatting with their professionals to be
active and
Aishwarya responsive. It enables the customer to directly chat with the professional to
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clear any questions, doubts, or concerns.
Gaurav Kumar Gupta
Tangibility
Ravneet Kaur
Services are tangible in nature and customers generally derive their understanding and
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Vertika Bansal
 perception about the service and its quality by comparison.
Urban Clap tries to ensure the best service packages to their customers. Their services
primarily fall under the blue-collar service head like Salon services offered at home. In
terms of white collared services, they provide yoga, interior designing, photography etc.
They try to gauge customer requirements and then try to match you to the best fit
according to their willingness to pay.
Empathy
Empathy in the service space requires providing individualized attention and care to the
customers. Urban Clap leads in this aspect since they offer services that women aged 20
years to 40 years demand:
1) Feel Comfortable: Generally, when one visits a salon, after the treatment, one is
required to leave their premises and travel back home since other customers are
waiting for their turn. But when one avails the services at home Urban Clap provides
the luxury of watching TV or reading a book or doing other things and there is no set
boundary for a quick treatment and relaxation post the treatment.
2) Relaxed Services: When one visits salons or parlors due to the customer demand and
waiting customers most beauticians are distracted and do not provide the best services
to make time for the next customer. Urban Clap solves this issue by providing exclusive
services to every individual and have also started offering group treatments wherein a
group of friends can also enjoy treatments together.

Marketplace Analysis of UrbanClap

UrbanClap was conceived with the idea of performing the role of a matchmaker connecting
service-providers, who are largely employed in the unorganized sector in the domestic
economy, to prospective customers seeking their services. The marketplace saw light
because the workforce in the unorganized sector is huge (comprising of about 900 million
people) and UrbanClap could successfully bring the crowd under a common fold due to their
value addition to the discovery services, supplemented by technology. The strategic choices
made by UrbanClap to coordinate the marketplace can be described as-
1. Membership:
UrbanClap initially had to use a brute-force technique to onboard service-providers
onto its platform. The contracting service-providers are chosen after an extensive 14-
day selection process with stringent requirements of quality. This has helped
UrbanClap establish expectations of high-quality service from its customers. Also,
conducting extensive background checks has excluded service-providers with
criminal records to come on board. However, the risk of rogue and unprofessional
behaviour from service-providers towards a customer always looms on the
reputation of the brand. The marketplace has membership for two kinds of service-
providers: Lead-generation (interior designers, architects, etc) and fulfilment
(plumbers, electricians, mechanics, beauticians, etc).

2. Rules:
There are set rules of conduct that contracting service-providers are briefed on and
trained when they join the platform for a fee. There are rules instated to ensure and

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 encourage compliance of service-providers such that the risk of disintermediation is
minimized. Also, UrbanClap focusses on providing a standardised experience for
repetitive, high-volume services, hence controlling service-provider behaviour and
user experience is extremely crucial to achieve a benchmark level of service quality.

3. Monitoring:
The elaborate task for monitoring becomes extremely crucial for UrbanClap as there
is a very high variety as well as possibility of even larger variability in the
consumption of its services. Rules such as the five-level integration and selfie on
starting service serve as checkpoints for quality control and compliance of service
providers. For ensuring continual monitoring of service quality, user engagement and
service provider behaviour, the rating system has been designed. It works on the
concept of a quality differentiator directly affecting the reputation of the service
provider, who in turn, get better or poorer quality work depending on their
reputation. Thus, the monitoring system consisting of ratings serve as the
“panopticon” of modern surveillance that make coordinating behaviour on the
platform easier for UrbanClap.

4. Sanctions:
The UrbanClap marketplace imposes various sanctions on the service-seekers and
service-providers such that the platform controls which service providers a customer
can possibly seek. First-time users are not given any choice among service-providers,
as this is the maiden service whose quality and delivery will determine how likely the
customer is to make a repeat service request.

5. Hierarchy:
The marketplace hierarchy has evolved over the years such that service providers
with greater reputation have been able to steadily increase their incomes and have
also brought in repeat business for UrbanClap. Thus, better reputation has led to
better discovery of the services on the platform. The hierarchy of the on-demand
service marketplace has increased as more and more competitors with similar
offerings have emerged, such as HouseJoy and QuikrServices. The evolution of the
marketplace has been described in [Exhibit-1] where consolidation of players and
standardization of services have been the driver. UrbanClap thus, faces direct
competition from players such as HouseJoy, Near.in and QuikrServices where
standardization of services such as house cleaning, dry cleaning, repair and
maintenance, etc have been common. The marketplace also has seen another set of
competitors emerge to create a hierarchy of discovery services. This has been shown
in [Exhibit-2].

Variety, Volume and Variability in UrbanClap’s offerings

The significance of volume is evident in UrbanClap’s fulfilment offerings. Since these are
repeat orders hence the quality-of-service delivery needs to be tightly controlled so that
variability can be minimized in the offerings.
On the other hand, the lead-generation services cater to the demands of customization and
personalization of offerings, and the service-providers too, are professionals with training

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and reputation already in place even before they begin to offer their services through
UrbanClap. In this segment, both customers and service-providers have much higher
expectations of service quality, thus, the cost of onboarding such service-providers is higher
for UrbanClap.
Consequently, variability is higher in the lead-generation services.

Managing Risks- Business Model, External Environment and Regulators

The Human Cloud Platform Model to build trust and provide project governance

Arbitrator
Governor
(Fulfilment Services)
(Buyer-Seller Liquidity,
Specialised match-
Ratings, and Seller
making with quality
quality vetting)
control

The
Facilitator
Platform Aggregator
(Lead Generation
Services) Aggregate multiple tasks
requested by service
Discovery of service seekers and maintain a
seeker and provider queue of service
with minimal value providers
addition by platform

The Suppliers The Platform

The Buyer

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The various white-collar services provided by Urban Clap are matched on the basis of a
number of factors like budget, understanding customer demands, availability of service
providers etc. Since this is different from their core competency, they must spin-off their
lead-generation services from the fulfilment services.

Exhibits
Exhibit-1: Direct Competitors of UrbanClap

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Exhibit 2: Indirect competitors of UrbanClap.

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