On average, a household owns approximately 8-10 electronic appliances such as air conditioners, water purifiers, refrigerators, TVs, etc. A customer regularly needs these appliances’ serviced from the manufacturer (OEM/Brand). When the time for such a service arrives, the customer has to go through many problems such as finding a call centre number, waiting in IVR queues, speaking to customer care agents who would ask me the same information repeatedly, and call drops, etc. Eventually, the customer gets frustrated and is left with no option but to go for an unauthorised service provider.
Nitin Chawla (Founder & CEO of OneDios) realised how much OEMs/Brands were willing to spend to assist customers in raising their requests. While many companies heavily invested in Apps to improve the customer experience for logging complaints and service requests, they faced the challenge of poor penetration and retention. Customers simply would not download an app for every appliance, brand, or product.
This is where the idea of OneDios was born. A one-stop-shop where users can register their products, keep invoices safe, raise service requests, and maintain the complete service history of any product. One god for all service requests is “OneDios.”
Market Insights and future
OneDios has ventured into a market that is unexplored as yet and offers massive potential. Every household has multiple appliances, gadgets, vehicles, utility services, and many more services needed on a day-to-day basis. For context, over 400 million existing appliances are owned by customers in India. Around 100 M appliances are sold in the market every year with an average life cycle of 4 years. This means something as simple as a demo/installation request alone would indicate 10 million requests per annum being routed to a call centre! OneDios makes the request process completely digital. Hence adoption and growth are inevitable.
The Product
The OneDios platform provides a single request gateway for customers to reach multiple brands and their services. It is based on the ideology to standardise the request registration experience for customers by providing a tech and integration layer that helps push services requests digitally to CRMs across brands hence reducing load and costs related to call centres across sectors. This is the foundation of OneDios’s “Brands First” and “Consumers First” Philosophy.
“Traditionally, brands have depended on their call center or their own app/website to receive service requests from their customers. However, call centers are costly & inefficient, and downloading an app for each brand or product is an unrealistic ask from a customer. We have understood this problem and built OneDios to bridge this gap.” Says Nitin.
With OneDios, A customer can register a service/complaint request for any brand for any product on OneDios in less than 60 Seconds and get on-demand status updates. Customers can also upload their product invoices and warranty cards to the App, and these are automatically made available when booking a service. Customers can also maintain the digital form of the invoices and warranty cards. The App also builds a service calendar and sends service reminders to its customers.
Building the Team
A start-up is only as good as its founder’s team. Nitin (an IBM India Alumni) built the proof of concept for OneDios in 2019. He then onboarded Amit Sharma (an IBM India Alumni) and Avinav Sapra (PwC UK Alumni) to help propel OneDios forward. Together the three have an impressive 50years+ of professional services experience between them, making them an effective execution machine.
Focus on core problems
OneDios has focussed on two core problems. Firstly, reducing call centre and service costs for brands and bringing them closer to their customers. Secondly, giving customers a single gateway to reach any brand for service/complaint requests for any product using it’s unified request gateway.
The team started with two initial product offerings. It has built proprietary AI/ML models to register a customer’s request and a request gateway through which the request is seamlessly passed to the brands.
The OneDios request gateway helps customers know their request status. Customers can share feedback on the services given by the brands ensuring higher customer satisfaction towards the brand.
“Brands like Daikin are already seeing lesser volumes at call centers after adopting OneDios.” Says Nitin. “Our Request generation process works on improving user experience by making the entire request process seamless and providing a consistent customer experience for all products and brands. Our technology provides customers with exciting products and offers to raise requests in less than 60 seconds. Repeat requests take less than 30 seconds!” he added.
Traction
“Our consumer and business partner apps have been very well received. With an increase of brands and services on the App, we hope to keep our consumers engaged in communicating with the brands they own, improving their brand loyalty and net NPS scores”, added Amit Sharma.
This is backed by the fact that the platform has garnered 3 Lakhs+ users and routed over 4 Lakhs+ requests to brands in less than two years. OneDios currently provides access to 50+ brands. OneDios is available pan India because Brands provide services across India, and customers can raise complaints from anywhere in India and get services straight from Brands.
OneDios generates revenue from multiple streams. For every request registered, brands pay a per ticket charge. Further, the company gets a commission for the sale of any extended warranty sales or AMC on the platform. Finally, Onedios gets a commission on accessories and genuine brand spares sales.
The team is onboarding more brands constantly, making their list of partners very impressive.
Getting Future Ready
There are literally thousands of electronics brands in India spread across micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), many of whom had to pivot to new business models to survive the coronavirus pandemic. OneDios is the post-pandemic world solution they need. It cuts out the need for physical call centres, hence saving costs for these companies and ensuring flexibility on how and from where their customer service teams operate.
Tech-in-Command
“Today no one in India is doing what we are doing. We are building India’s first service aggregator with a brands first approach. Our business model is set up so that we have skin in the game, which means we’ll make money only if our brands benefit and our solutions demonstrate value delivery. This ties in with our brands-first approach. This is what sets us apart from our competitors and gives our clients a deeper trust in us. For our customers, it ensures they need only one service app on their phones! Some truly exciting times lie ahead of us, and we are super thrilled for this next phase,” said the team.
The founding team at OneDios dream to turn it into the next Unicorn of the service tech world. The offering is truly unique, and this is definitely a start-up to keep an eye on.
