The gas and electricity market is saturated which makes it hard to make a difference. Essent is looking for new ways to improve customer satisfaction and retention. That's why they teamed up with MakerLab (a sister of Webflight and also part of the MakerStreet network) to come up with new, innovative, business ideas. After extensive market research and concept validation, they came up with the following idea: A service that allows Essent and non-Essent customers to hire a professional to do all sorts of jobs in and around the house. These jobs vary from fixing someone's Wifi to painting a wall. The ZoOpgelost platform distinguishes itself from other services by having: - Fixed prices for every job; - No call out charge; - Jobs that are done by a professional; - Narrow time windows in which the job gets done; - Urgent help within the hour
Business Need: The gas and electricity market is saturated which makes it hard to make a difference. Essent is looking for new ways to improve customer satisfaction and retention. That's why they teamed up with MakerLab (a sister of Webflight and also part of the MakerStreet network) to come up with new, innovative, business ideas. After extensive market research and concept validation, they came up with the following idea: A service that allows Essent and non-Essent customers to hire a professional to do all sorts of jobs in and around the house. These jobs vary from fixing someone's Wifi to painting a wall. The ZoOpgelost platform distinguishes itself from other services by having: - Fixed prices for every job; - No call out charge; - Jobs that are done by a professional; - Narrow time windows in which the job gets done; - Urgent help within the hour
Solution: Together with TouchTribe (a sister of Webflight), https://zoopgelost.essent.nl/ was created. The Javascript frontend guides the user through a funnel ultimately resulting in an appointment with a professional. All the dynamic data in the frontend is exposed by RESTful API's through the Mendix backend. Frontend also calls the Mendix API to do user management, order creation, retrieving available timeslots for jobs and more. One of the main challenges for this project was connecting all entities involved. The Mendix backend was used to communicate with the Service Partner, Essent CRM and the ZoOpgelost website. All this is done by exposing and consuming RESTful API's. Another reason for the use of Mendix is because of the extensive amount of business logic involved. Along with the need to deliver the project within just 3 months, Mendix was the only right choice.
Results: The result of the project is a fully-functioning, user friendly platform that people can use to get something done by a professional. Behind the scenes, Essent employees can manage jobs, customers and more. The Mendix platform makes sure that all data is handled correctly and distributed to all stakeholders.