The perennial skills challenge

(3 minutes read)

Skills, knowledge and ability are prerequisites for any technical task. While ability is inborn and may also be acquired through training. Knowledge can be acquired through learning and research. Skill stands out as something which can only be acquired by doing and practice.

Traditionally the maintenance and repair industry ensured availability of sufficient skilled manpower and continues to do so. Outside of this we have freelancers; former employees of traditional companies, or self trained. 

This freelance trained manpower is the human resource available to app based companies. 

These people who are going and doing the work for the customers, these freelancers, they were already there in the ecosystem and they were earlier going to the customers through word of mouth networks.

This was the traditional review system, now recreated as star ratings and reviews in the service marketplace.

For example in the home appliances service market, you have various brands. These companies are having their own trained people who are coming to you as their service engineers.

There is a call center through which you get in touch with the company and somebody comes over to do the repair.

This process is cumbersome as many times the representative has many places to go to and will not be able to respond to the customer as quickly as a freelancer who is known to the customer. 

This is where the Freelancer wins.

If the freelancer is a trained technician, he or she is able to repair multiple brands of appliances in quite a skillful manner. A freelancer’s lower overheads allow reasonable prices, which is a major factor. 

The freelancer also makes a personal rapport with the customer. This element of trust is valuable and brings repeat business to the freelancer, making him or her the go to person for the customer. 

The new app based companies are dependent on this pool of people. The freelancers will work with these companies if they feel there is a benefit, for example ease of access to multiple customers.

The app based companies could start training technicians too like the traditional service industry to bolster the number of trained technicians. The challenge though would be that this training will have to be on a variety of brands. Sourcing of spare parts would also be a challenge.

The quality of service that the freelancer provides to the customer is likely to be high. This may be difficult to ensure when a service technician works through an app based company even after use of incentive, rating and review systems.

App based companies will have a challenge when sometimes a person whom they have accepted as a freelancer may not be that skilled. That is where customer retention can become an issue especially when they are having to compete with the freelancer who is working for himself and may be very careful about the service provided. 

There is also the issue of leakage, where technicians may do further work bypassing the app based company.

It will be interesting to watch how this competition between the freelancer,the traditional branded service stations and the app based companies plays out.

For app based companies the  convenience for a customer giving a call and getting a technician is a huge factor especially in the present days where the customers are short of time.

The real deciding factor may be the level of skill. 

Which brings us to accurate certification of skills of technicians.

The IT industry has online certification. But for hardware we need offline certification which is reliable.

If such offline courses are offered by branded manufacturers and are affordable for freelancers, then we could have a win-win solution. The branded manufacturers get paid for the training, the freelancers get focused skills, the app based companies get a bigger pool of people and the customers get quality maintenance and repair service.

What is more, this may lead to customers’ willingness to pay more for skilled service making it all a virtuous circle.

Do offer your comments here or in the forums.

Thanks for reading

Jastej Matharu

I am an Indian Army veteran with specialization in military vehicle technology. I founded MRO Channel Forum to provide a platform to MRO professionals.