On a lazy Sunday evening, electrician Manoj Upadhyay knocked on a customer’s door at Mumbai’s suburban Vile Parle at the appointed time. Just two months ago, he would land up at a customer’s house several hours after the agreed time.
Much like a well-paid sales executive, the 36-year-old now greets his customer with a “good evening sir”, gets on to work without much ado, and leaves with a firm handshake and goodbye.
“I have changed from being an erratic worker, who used to reach hours late, to a highly-disciplined worker. Now, I get work regularly and my earnings have risen more than four-fold to about ₹14,000 a month,” Upadhyay said.
He has Doormint.com, a home services aggregator, to thank. The firm is among the new breed of start-ups providing training to blue-collar workers on soft skills (communication and etiquette), hygiene, dressing, discipline and technology (using smartphones and apps).
“We want to make sure our service providers are professionals — because they are now associated with a brand. We train them at the time of on-boarding and also revise their bills based on customer feedback,” said Abhinav Agarwal, co-founder and CEO, Doormint.
Ditto at Timesaverz.com, an on-demand home-service provider. The company, which offers cleaning, appliance repair, errand and handyman services (plumber, painter or carpenter) through its 1,000 or so service partners (blue-collar workers), provides a 25-pointer guideline of dos and don’ts to its team.
“These include how to be on time and not to overcharge, and also on technology (mobile apps). Now as everything is over the mobile, such as job alerts, payments and tracking, it’s necessary to train them,” said Debadutta Upadhyaya, Co-Founder, Timesaverz.
The training is part of an on-boarding process and is provided at its offices once the service partners’ skill sets have been cleared and background checks done. A social scientist is also pushed into service to help the partners develop their communication skills, she added.
At Taskbob.com, the training begins with an induction programme, and refresher courses are conducted at regular intervals.
“We have in-house subject experts for skills training, customer services and apps training. We also assure a minimum salary, in the ₹10,000-20,000 range, depending on the worker, and the upside depends on hard work,” said Aseem Khare, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Taskbob.
While many of the home service aggregators spend much time and money on these training programmes, they swear that the customer is still the winner. “The quality of service has leaped and discipline — on charges and timings — has been brought into this unorganised sector,” Khare added.