HomeAdvisor stopped contractors from taking deals off-platform by guaranteeing homeowners' projects would succeed, then requiring all payments to flow through the company. The sales team manually onboarded contractors to explain the new rules and gather feedback for the product.
Chapters
I mean, the big challenge is leakage, as you might imagine. So big challenge was that we knew that there was transactions happening that weren't going through the HomeAdvisor payment system. And so immediately, once we identified that that truly was a challenge, and we knew that was going to be a challenge going into it, or at least we hypothesized it was, we started messing around with different mechanisms to keep people on the platform. So we did things both on the consumer as well as on the business owner side. On the consumer side, one of the things that we did, just to give an example here, is we rolled out something called the HomeAdvisor Guarantee, which effectively guaranteed the outcomes of a project that a homeowner was engaging with. And we knew from research that a lot of homeowners have anxiety and fear about hiring the right person, ensuring that that person's actually going to show up. ensuring that the work that they get done is actually the work that's needed, that they're not getting ripped off or getting sold something that's not actually needed, if it's especially for something like a repair. And so we offered this guarantee to help protect consumers, and that really gave a pretty strong incentive to consumers to stay on platform. And then on the business side, we effectively created terms so that we had to see kind of payment go through for them to continue to play in the system. So we did that. We ended up actually working with a lot of our sales reps to introduce onboarding and education so that business owners were aware of this new business model. Because one of the things that we discovered early on is that this business model was very new within the industry. And even though we felt like we had adequate messaging throughout the product, a lot of these businesses simply just didn't comprehend kind of this change. And so we had to kind of take a little bit more of a manual approach early on to both educate business owners and also to learn to then kind of bake some of those learnings back into the product.
