Because of the national lockdown due to Covid-19, Sulekha.com, a match-making platform, which matches more than 2 million service requests with 1.30 lakh professionals is witnessing a drop in demand on most of the services offered.
Srini Vasan, CTO at Sulekha is tasked with enabling the firm’s operational continuity. Post the lockdown, Sulekha’s 85 percent of workforce–close to 1,000–is working from home.
For the company’s product, tech, marketing teams, adopting WFH culture was not a challenge because they were already used to collaborating via Microsoft Teams and not being able to do face-to-face meetings was also not a problem.
But enabling WFH for sales and operations teams was initially a challenge for the company. To ensure that, Vasan’s team had to complete three one-day turnarounds to make important tools mobile-friendly.
However, Vasan also expects to see some dip in productivity for certain teams who are not used to working from home.
“Our IT support team worked relentlessly to ensure the work from home set up was done close to perfection for most of our sales and ops team members. Team leads are keeping in touch with their team members on a regular basis to ensure the dip is not drastic”, said Vasan.
Being a local services platform, a significant portion of Sulekha’s sales process works offline. Going forward, Vasan is also planning to increase the pace of digitizing the firm’s sales processes.
“Even before this disruption, we were working on systems to digitize it”, he said.
One such initiative includes creation of internal systems and mobile apps for enhancing productivity of sales and customer service employees.
The leads are assigned to the sales team through an autodialer system which has nearly doubled their productivity. The interface that assists the executives during sales pitch has market intelligence data points like customers, high demand categories, and deliverable capacity.
There is already a spike in demand for some of the services on the platform such as daily essentials, cooking, healthcare and entertainment. “We are prioritizing our sales activities based on the shift in demand to ensure equilibrium until the situation eases.”
Covid-19 tracing solution
The company’s tech team has also collaborated with other firms to develop a Covid-19 tracing solution. The solution is about building a mathematical model to arrive at the likelihood of a person having Covid-19 using Google GPS location data, cellular phone tower history data and transactions data. The company is also in talks with the government for this solution.
Three years ago, Sulekha.com migrated to cloud and Vasan enlists faster time-to-market, improved dev-ops, scaling of services easily, and data analytics as some of its benefits.
“With new advancements in machine learning and deep learning, the cloud will help us to try out multiple experiments at a much faster rate. Deployment on various learning applications will be much easier with the cloud,” he asserted.
