The on-demand home services platform Helpling today announced it will globally migrate to the technology of its British subsidiary Hassle.com. Helpling acquired the European pioneer of online home services in 2015. The new technology platform will allow customers to browse individual cleaner profiles before booking – strengthening Helpling’s position as a curated online marketplace for cleaners. It also offers cleaners and their customers more features to manage their relationship directly on the platform. For cleaners, it has never been so easy to manage their independent business. The migration has already taken place in France and Germany, with other markets soon to follow.
Helpling acquired Hassle.com in July of last year and gained access not only to the strategically important markets of the UK and Ireland but also to a great technological platform. Since Hassle.com was founded in 2012, the functionalities of the platform have been continously refined.
Helpling co-founder Philip Huffmann stated: “The functionalities are perfectly optimized for a personal relationship between service providers and the customers. It increases the comfort on both sides; strengthening a long-term relationship in a an area where trust is crucial.”
As the new platform allows customers and service providers to communicate with each other directly on the platform and to make changes to bookings or invoices without going through the Helpling customer care call center. Besides a clearly improved customer experience, Helpling will be able to reduce operational costs and ultimately accelerate its path to profitability.
Benedikt Franke, Co-founder of Helpling, explained: “Our business model is based on the fact that customer and cleaner are able to maintain a long-term relationship through our platform. The new features will increase the value of the platform for both sides: the easy and direct communication with each other, the simple process of adapting of invoices as well as the security through liability and accident insurance, leave no reason for getting a home cleaner on the black market”.
Helpling, which is headquartered in Berlin, was founded in 2014 and is a portfolio company of Rocket Internet. The idea behind Helpling was basically copied from the U.S.-based startup Homejoy, which had to shut down its operations in 2015.
