User Journey on an On-Demand Business Platform - An 8 part series

Ever wondered what forms the foundation of the user journey on an on-demand platform? Let’s find out. This week we will set you off on a journey of your own! We bring to you an 8 part series that will explain the different modules we use to build a robust business platform, in the order that a user encounters them.

Any business working on-demand needs a solid technological foundation to function. Companies like Uber, Instacart, AirBnB are elegant ideas but they would not have been a reality if they had not had the technology to integrate offline supply and online demand so well. This brings us to the definition of an entire economy built around this value offering. The on-demand economy is the economic activity created by digital platforms that fulfill consumer demand placed online via immediate access to and convenient provisioning of goods and services offline.

It is revolutionizing the way in which people go about their lives and interact with the labour market, and the explosive growth of the most elegant on-demand ideas has made us realize that we are only just beginning to unlock the potential of this ‘on-demand’ economy. These new technology driven platforms have the capacity to increase the pool of potential services providers and sellers by leveraging networked technology to change how participants engage in a specific transaction. For instance, service providers are now signing up on platforms to connect directly with consumers, and the consumers now have the convenience of availing services from the comfort of their homes. A dramatic increase in the number of smartphone connected consumers, simple and secure purchase flows, and location-based services are a few of the market conditions making the necessity of having a brick and mortar shop obsolete.

What is a platform?

A platform is a place that enables interactions between customers and service providers. On-demand services are platforms and what is enabling transactions on these platforms is a robust technology framework. We could envision a platform’s working with its three basic components : Community, Infrastructure and Data.

At a 100 feet level it may look simple, that the customer requests for a service, and a service provider accepts the request and provides that service on-demand, but as we go deeper we are able to see that there are so many complexities at each stage of the user journey that it becomes difficult to just look at the big picture and understand how it all works. We realized this soon enough when we were attempting to fit the needs of different business models associated with on-demand platforms attempting to streamline varied verticals.

After discussing over 1000s of business models with clients, we have understood that no two on-demand platforms are the same. These business models although similar, may become vastly different when trying to implement their technology. Recently, we published an ebook called ‘Technology for an On-Demand Platform : Mapping the User Journey’ wherein we tried to identify the basic modules common to most on-demand services. The image below illustrates how each module facilitates different steps in the customer and service provider journey. We now bring to you the ebook broken down into an eight-part series that includes technology modules for on-demand businesses based on Identity, Scheduling, Matching, Notifications, Tracking, Payment, Review and Promo Codes. We hope that points in each module serve as a starting point when you deliberate on the technology behind your on-demand business. We will be posting the first module, ‘Identity’ in a couple of days! Stay Tuned.

Please click on the image below to enlarge it.