START-UP ISLAND. Bringing professionalism and standards to home services

One thing that is working for the Centre’s initiatives such as Make In India, Digital India and Skill India: both large enterprises and start-ups one talks to want to be seen as playing a role. Achieving impact with these initiatives will take stakeholder participation, especially with Skill India. This is how home services start-up Taskbob sees itself making a difference.

It aggregates skilled workers from different spheres – drivers to handymen to beauticians. But as one of its founders, Aseem Khare, says, “Aggregating servicepersons alone is not the answer to the problem.”

On the one hand, middle-class India will increasingly need electricians, plumbers and handymen. But, on the other, there’s mistrust in servicemen, according to Taskbob.

“If there’s high degree of professionalism and the consumer experiences quality of service, both the blue-collar community and customers benefit,” says Khare.

Out of an 80-strong workforce, eight people at the company are dedicated to hiring servicepersons, and in particular, conducting psychometric evaluation of those who join the Taskbob community. After police and address verifications, servicepersons reportedly undergo “heavy training”; beauticians may be in training longer (about a month) than, say, drivers or electricians.

Says Khare, “While there’s un-professionalism in the market, there’s also high supply that is not of a desired standard. If we increase their professionalism, end customers will pay and blue-collar workers can command better rates.”

Taskbob employs a combination of in-house skilling, external product trainers and consultant trainers for both technical and soft skills, going as far as karate classes for servicewomen. Khare believes this contributes to “real development”.

The company has a community of 300 servicepersons it prefers to call ‘experts’.

Having kicked off operations in late 2014, the focus is to “go deeper into Mumbai”, even as Taskbob says it gets 800–1,000 orders a day and has grown 10 times in the past year.

“Over the next 3-4 months, we’ll enter either Bengaluru or Pune or Delhi, and then take a call on further expansion at the end of another year. We want things to work efficiently, so that we can keep staff optimal in other cities,” Khare says. Skill India’s objective is “inclusive growth especially for those at the bottom of the pyramid (approximately 800 million citizens)”. It would be useful to regularly assess how much of the skilling is leading to actual employment. Taskbob seems to be doing just that in its own way.

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