The year of 2016 was not kind to startups, and especially the ones running their operations in markets that have a ready room for expansion. Often, a large market signifies ready room for expansion and this warrants an enhanced service representation, or an increase in the number of service providers that are either employed by the enterprise or hired as freelancers. Today, when almost every enterprise running the ‘Uber for X’ model is running their operations through the service providers who form the bridge between the app and the user, it becomes important to evaluate the performance of each service provider as they amount to much more than just delivery boys or cab drivers.
To begin with, what can service providers do in order to enhance the profits of your enterprise? The obvious answer would be for them to excel at their job, but the operations within a ‘Uber for X’ business model do not follow a linear approach. Therefore, the unprecedented occurrences in any business operation are dealt with service providers, more than often, and therefore, we must shift our focus on them in order to identify the areas critical to enhanced profits for any business. Turns out, enterprises that offer training to their service providers in the initial stages find benefits in the long run. Given how the customers wish to be treated today, it is important for your service providers to be on the top of their game.
However, the buck doesn’t stop at training, for service providers these days are your ready source of information when it comes to understanding the trends prevailing amongst the consumers. For the relevant businesses, service providers must be given a feedback platform, like rating and compliments in the case of Uber. This can help the parent enterprise understand what the users are looking for, what they don’t need, and where they are seeking improvements. Your service providers offer an alternative, yet informal, medium for users and customers to have their grievances addressed.
Alongside, encouraging competition amongst your service providers helps in the improvement of the services being imparted. Any large enterprise requires more than a single service provider in order to cater to the rising market demand, and therefore, in order to ensure that the services being offered are impeccable, you can have added incentives, along with other schemes. The idea is to reward the service providers for their continued expertise and excellence in services, and this does offer enough inspiration for the new ones coming in. At the end of the day, you have an overall business structure where each element is looking to compete with the other to do good for the customer.
The grass won’t always be green, and therefore, there will be times when your own service providers, hired or freelancing, would be a cause of worry. The enterprise must have a mechanism in place that ensures removal of such service providers immediately. Sometimes, the actions of even a single one out of a million service providers can bring a lot of mud to the company’s name, as Uber learned it through the cases of molestation and assaults registered against its drivers.
