A disruptive business model for white goods services

The Story

The European market for services related to white goods offers great potentials for novel business models. Family home owners, vendors of white goods and craftsmen all do have complementary needs that could be leveraged through a platform business model. A startup has been funded by partners of PROCOMM together with industry experts as a a joint-effort to capture these opportunities.

The Solution

The vendors of white goods such as washing machines do have highly exposed brands on the market. Representative surveys show that family home owners decide on investment of white good brands primarily based on their past service experience. It is unlikely that family home owners will invest again the same brand if the service experience had not been satisfactory. Furthermore, vendors often employ a network of craftsmen to provide the actual services and are therefore not in control of service quality and customer satisfaction. Yet, many of the mid-sized vendors cannot afford a fully managed custom solution tailor-made for their needs.

The family home owners are looking for a way to easily book services and have them executed on-time, cleanly, reliably and hassle-free. Representative surveys show that these requirements are barely met. All sorts of avoidable problems occur from the booking of the appointment to the execution of the service to the billing.

Craftsmen are looking for ways to flatten their capacity peaks in this highly volatile market. White goods need to be fixed as soon as possible causing accumulation of peaks for the craftsmen. Furthermore, they would be more than happy having a reliable partner who coordinates the appointments and ensures a reliable invoicing. Yet they are too small (1-2 person per company) to afford a fully fledged solution on their own.

The new platform aligns and leverages this market situation. For the vendor it’s a platform to drive customer experience across the whole customer journey. For the family home owners it is a platform to easily schedule appointments with a nice experience from booking to delivery, to invoicing. For the craftsmen its a great way to optimize their resource allocation and dedicating less time on administrative tasks.

The Result

The first customer of the platform was an European industrial group. Apart from several retail channels in European countries the customer runs an own direct sales channel in the swiss market for both private customers (such as house owners) and professional customers (such as architects). The customer operates a call center dedicated to the swiss market, serving customers in four languages. In Q1 2017, the digital booking process for sales appointments was successfully launched on the platform. Feedback from customers and internal employees have been amazing. By Q2 2018 the digital booking of service appointments will be successfully covered as well.