We are living in an exciting Digital era, where Technology and smartphones have transformed the way we used to avail the services. We have seen the evolution of the on-demand service marketplace, which is gaining massive popularity all over the world. The on-demand service marketplace makes the services available at customers’ doorstep. Customers can search for the services they need, and can easily connect with the local vendors, who can provide all possible kinds of household services at a competitive cost.
The most used on-demand service is certainly the Technician Booking platform, which helps customers to avail the services of Technician to fix the usual technical problems with their digital gadgets and electronic components. Technician booking platforms bring a marketplace where vendors can also connect with their potential customers and other stakeholders who can avail their services and provide the tools and components to serve the customers.
It also allows the Technicians to be listed on the app, where they must undergo an intensive training module and an adequate due diligence process so that their services are listed on the platform.
Technical booking platform offers the services listed according to locations, budget, and Type, and it offers the services providers a brilliant medium to reach their potential consumers with ease. In this article, we will cover several aspects of a Technician Booking application, its workflow, revenue model, advantages, and application development process as well.
At the same time, we will deep dive into the requirements, essential features, and the application development strategy one need to adopt to develop a successful Technician Booking platform application.
A Technician booking platform usually offers two-fold functioning, from the User and Service Providers perspective.
A Technician booking platform has the following standard workflow
Here consumers can book the service by selecting the job type, budget, and preferred visit time.
Once the service is selected, the app will notify the consumer about the probable cost estimate of the job. It will also provide the quotation, where all the charges along with the applicable taxes are mentioned.
The service provider accepts the task and then assigns it to a technician it will also help them to schedule the technician visit based on their availability.
The technician can view the job details and accept or reject them based on availability and feasibility.
The technician can visit the customer’s premises to perform the requested task and update the work order with pictures or the customer’s validation.
Once the job is completed, the system will generate an invoice and ask a customer to make the payment. Once the payment is done, the job is closed.
Technician booking application is getting massive popularity among users and service providers, as it offers following advantages :
The app allows consumers to select from a wide number of service providers, based on their requirements, budget, and schedule.
The app enhances the overall service execution time by faster technician scheduling, reducing the travel time by helping the technicians to reach their locations quickly.
The application eliminates all sort of communication hurdles, that ensures transparent billing and effective invoice.
The powerful technician booking app ensures there are no operation leakages, and it also reduces other administrative costs, ultimately it helps an organization to reduced operational costs.
The app helps all the workers to stay connected round the clock, which improves productivity and communication of technicians and other workers.
The software has too many checks and balances in place, which ensures better accountability for employees.
A technician booking platform helps a service provider to break away from the conventional methods and offer innovative services to the end-users, which not only improves the customer experience but also provides an opportunity to improve the revenue.
Technician booking app helps vendors to offer personalization and a wide variety of services to their consumers. It also helps a service provider to develop a loyal customer base by addressing their concerns in an effective way.
A Technician booking application uses a very simple business and revenue model. As we know, it is just an intermediary platform, that uses a perfect matching algorithm to offer the required technician to the end-user. This app utilizes the following revenue generation techniques.
A major part of revenue for Technician booking applications comes from this model. Here the Technician must pay a certain amount as a commission for every job order they receive via the app. The app will act as an intermediary entity, which will charge an appropriate amount for any order booked by the customers.
Every work will have different charges depending on the complexity and efforts required to fulfill that work. It is quite a simple aspect that the more work is booked and completed, the more money the app owner will earn.
This is another method to generate revenue. The Technician booking platform can list the professionals and offer the required information to the customers as per their requirements. Once any lead generated by the app is converted, then a certain amount is charged from the Technician or the Service provider who got the work order from the customer.
The potential app must contain the following features so that it can fulfill the requirements of the Consumers and the Service Providers.
This feature will help Admins to automate the order assignment process.
This will help Admins to create, execute and manage the advertisements and other promotional campaigns.
This will offer a reporting and visualization of sales figures, that will help the management to keep a track of all activities and make future decisions and course corrections.
This allows Admins to manage the Notification services, which helps them to engage the customers.
Admins can utilize this feature.
In this section, we will be explaining certain important aspects which need to be taken care of before starting the development process. We will also talk about the technical constraints, stack required, different modules, and the estimated cost of the final solution.
Well, we have already given you a glimpse of a Technician Booking platform, and in this section, we would like to provide you a better insight into the business model on which such applications are developed. A Technician booking application offers professional services of household tasks like electricians, computer experts, smartphone technicians, household item experts, and many more. A Technician booking app generally uses an algorithm to search and find the best match for customer’s requirements, and then help them to book a technician, avail the services, make the payment.
Before developing such an application, one should ensure that the business model should be well defined, and application purpose, location, pricing, and technology constraints should be well addressed.
That’s the first step to conceptualize an idea for the application. We must know what kind of technical services are in demand in a specific area and what kind of services one can offer, which could be profitable for both consumers and the service provider. This requires thorough market research, where it is required to understand the competitors’ reviews, the services they are offering, and the kind of services consumers expecting.
This is an important step, as it helps us to shape the concept into a feasible being. One must divide the idea into three broad categories and label them as must-have, would-like, and add-ons. We should start working on must-have components and then move towards would-like and add-ons components.
Now as we know about the potential features and modules of our app, we have gained enough knowledge about the workflow and sequence of tasks, it is time to transform them into a visual entity. We must study the existing applications in the market and write down their pros and cons, along with the kind of features they offer. We can use this list to incorporate the required functionality in our application, which certainly makes it useful and user-friendly as well.
This is the most important part, which certainly is an important aspect that decided the success or failure of an app. We need to decide the service amount that could be charged from the customers and the service providers. This could be a variable amount that depends on the type of service offered, the demand for that specific service, location, and the budget of the customer. We must incorporate multiple payment options for the customers such as UPI payments, online wallets, net banking, debit, or credit cards, etc.
We must establish a conflict management and refund policy to prevent any issues between consumers and technician service providers. This will not only help the consumers to avail the right support, but it will also help to build trust among all the entities. These policies also ensure that customers remain loyal to the service provider.
To turn an idea into a reality, we must take the support of an app development firm. We have a lot of professional software development firms which can assist us with app development. We may also employ our own software engineering team, or hire freelancers, but it all depends on the work requirements.
The cost of developing a Technician booking mobile app is very much dependent on the efforts and hourly rates of the resources you are about to hire. Here we have a fair comparison of average hourly rates in different regions.
Region | Price Range | Average Price (Per Hour) |
---|---|---|
North America | $80-$230 | $150 |
South America | $30-$110 | $40 |
United Kingdom | $80 to $180 | $120 |
India | $10-$60 | $30 |
Eastern Europe | $30-$100 | $50 |
Australia | $30-$120 | $80 |
Going by the hourly rates mentioned above, it is evident that the cost of Technician booking mobile app cost is higher in USA, UK, and other western countries, whereas the cost is on the lower side in India and South American countries. It is always suggested to outsource the app development tasks to these countries, as they can provide you quality software development at a fraction of the cost.
Now, let’s see how many days it takes to develop different app features.
Feature | Days (Minimum) | Days (Maximum) |
---|---|---|
User Signup/Login | 2 | 4 |
In-app Chat or Video Call | 5 | 10 |
Search Function | 2 | 4 |
Appointment or Home Visit Schedule | 5 | 10 |
Service Cost estimation | 5 | 10 |
Loyalty Programs | 5 | 10 |
Payment Gateway | 5 | 10 |
Accept or Reject an appointment | 2 | 8 |
Appointment Status | 2 | 10 |
View local vendors Details | 2 | 6 |
Order Quotation generation ability | 2 | 4 |
Periodic Reports | 10 | 20 |
Earning Status | 2 | 5 |
Sales Analytics | 10 | 20 |
Voice search | 20 | 40 |
Augmented Reality | 20 | 60 |
Maps Integration | 2 | 5 |
CMS and Blog | 5 | 10 |
Technician Profile verification and approval | 2 | 5 |
User Management | 5 | 10 |
Technician Management | 5 | 10 |
Notification Management | 2 | 5 |
Advanced CRM and CMS system | 5 | 10 |
Data Encryption and Safety | 5 | 10 |
Catalogue management | 10 | 20 |
Automated Order assignment | 10 | 20 |
Price and Subscription Plan Management | 5 | 10 |
Though this is still a rough cost estimate, it can still give you an insight into the efforts and costs required to develop a successful Technician Booking platform. We would also like to add that the above cost estimate doesn’t factor in other costs and efforts, such as project preparation activities, project release, time spent on communication, and many other important activities that take place during the app development process.
Selection of correct Technology stack for Technician booking mobile app plays an important role in the app development. Though it totally depends on the project requirement and complexity, we can use the given technology stack and components to develop an MVP rapidly:
Well, the mobile application has been developed, but it isn’t over yet. An application is not successful until and unless more people started using it. It is very much important to promote the application, make people aware of its existence, features, and utility so that more people start using it.
Here are few promotional methods we can employ to improve the visibility of the app.
We can target the potential audience through social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook via organic posting and paid promotions.
It has been emerged as one of the biggest platforms to promote the brand and content. We can develop household service videos and then create paid promotions on YouTube so that every household person can relate to them.
We can promote the app by displaying its advertisements using the Google Ads service, as it will place ads all over the web and offer them to customers when they enter a specific keyword. Google Ads is highly successful in placing the right advertisements to the customer, and it attains a very high conversion rate as well.
In order to promote the application, we can engage a famous social media influencer for brand endorsement. It has been an innovative but highly effective method these days, and it fetches very high conversion rates.
We are living in an era where almost everyone is using smartphones with high-speed internet service. Every user installs multiple applications to fulfill the specific types of tasks, and On-demand services are the most used applications. The technician booking platform is a kind of On-demand service application, that offers its customers an opportunity to avail the services instantly at their location.
This application helps the people who are working and have less time to contact the local vendors due to their long working hours. For them, it is a big utility to search a technician using their smartphones, schedule the visit at a convenient time, make the payment online.
It is high time for any technical service provider to build such a technician booking platform to improve their overall service delivery and customer satisfaction. Such application can help to improve the revenue, cost-effectiveness, and productivity of an organization. As far as the future is concerned, such technician booking platforms are going to gain massive popularity among the masses, and it is a great idea to develop such applications.