Recently, CFDCC and Master Wan jointly released the "2023 Home Service Industry Insight Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Industry Report"), which has attracted widespread attention in the industry. Among them, the report focuses on the front-line service practitioners in the home furnishing industry, and truly presents the employment status and development prospects of the master group through portrait analysis, employment scale, employment flow and career planning.
1. Portrait of front-line service providers: male masters are mainly born in the 80s, and female masters are emerging
According to the latest data from the industry report, the main force of front-line home furnishing services is mainly represented by the post-80s and post-90s, that is, young adults aged 25 to 44. Of these, 94 per cent are men and 6 per cent are women.
Since most of the furniture is a large commodity, the supporting services provided by merchants generally include door-to-door delivery and installation, which has certain requirements for the original equipment and physical strength of the service provider, so it has a corresponding threshold.
The service needs initiated by the consumer side are different, mainly focusing on the three types of maintenance, installation, and cleaning. Among them, maintenance is the most popular project.
Compared with installation services, maintenance pays more attention to the in-depth understanding of the product, and needs to accurately determine the cause of the failure and effectively solve the problem. Guo Hao, the maintenance master of Master Wan's platform, said: "As long as the installation mastered the type, you can draw inferences from one another. Repairs are not the same. Every user wants to repair the product, the problem to be solved is different, you want to think about the corresponding solution, which needs to think, but also more test the technology. ”
The soul of maintenance lies in restoration, especially the restoration of the color of the furniture itself, in Guo Hao's view, the color similarity must reach more than 95%.
At present, the service types of domestic home service practitioners are still mainly installation and maintenance, among which the number of installation masters is far ahead, concentrated in furniture, bathroom, lamps and household appliances.
The reason is that the home furnishing service industry was originally a service industry derived from the home furnishing retail market, so the type of service provider is strongly related to market demand.
Based on the perspective of the merchant side, under the omni-channel layout, the third-party professional service platform is selected as the after-sales support, which can solve the two major pain points of cost and demand at the same time. Therefore, the emerging service model represented by the crowdsourcing service model has become the mainstream of the industry.
2. Employment flow of service providers: concentrated in first-tier cities, showing a trend of "reverse urbanization".
In recent years, the scale of home service in mainland China has continued to expand, with more than 37.6 million people by the end of 2021, and it is still growing rapidly.
Thanks to the rapid development of the digital economy, the pattern of domestic employment has undergone significant changes. According to data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, there are currently 200 million people in flexible employment in the country, accounting for nearly one-seventh of the total population.
New forms of employment such as the platform economy, gig economy, and sharing economy not only meet the needs of some people for flexible employment and increase income due to their flexible employment methods, time, and relationships, but also become a "reservoir" for absorbing employment.
The Internet platform represented by Master Wan took the lead in introducing Internet technology into the service industry, aggregating high-quality service resources across the country through the crowdsourcing model, and transforming traditional home furnishing services with the help of emerging technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, so as to achieve more accurate matching of supply and demand, solve the pain points of "difficult employment" in the industry, and help master groups solve employment problems.
According to the industry report, in 2023, the scale of first-tier home service providers will continue to expand, showing a polarized distribution in geography, and the scale of masters in fifth-tier cities will surpass that of third- and fourth-tier cities for the first time, and will be basically the same as that of second-tier cities.
In addition to the annual steady influx into first-tier cities, more and more master groups are "reversely" flowing, tending to stay in fourth- and fifth-tier cities to undertake local home service needs.
This also reflects the changing trend of today's service market, relying on the upstream retail market and the proportion of demand has decreased slightly, and the low-frequency attributes of traditional household products are gradually decoupled, and more than 6 percent of families need at least 1-3 after-sales services in a quarter.
With the change of consumers' living concept, young consumer groups pay attention to the pursuit of quality of life, saving time is to save money, and a new lifestyle represented by "free hands" and "let professional people do professional things" has become a trend.
3. Home Furnishing Master in the New Era: Pay equal attention to efficiency and quality, and create personal IP with differentiated services
The home furnishing industry has entered the service era from the channel era, the user's consumption consciousness has awakened, and shopping habits have also undergone significant changes. Nowadays, offline physical stores have not competed in the main battlefield, and more than 4 percent of home furnishing users choose offline purchases, mostly through brand flagship stores, live broadcast rooms and influencer grass planting.
The decision-making factors that influence consumers' purchase focus on brand value, efficacy value, quality value and service guarantee. Transaction experience and service delivery have become a key focus for users.
As the most intuitive and profound part of consumer perception, the "last mile" service delivery determines the user's "first impression" of the brand, and the service timeliness and service quality directly affect the brand reputation.
In order to provide high-quality services on a large scale, in 2021, Master Wan proposed the concept of "professionalization" of service providers for the first time in the industry, and opened the "Master Professionalization Experimental Base", which is committed to comprehensively promoting the vocational education of service providers and systematically empowering the modernization and transformation of traditional blue-collar groups.
It is understood that the master professional experimental base is the industry's first skills training platform for home skill service providers, as a standardized teaching place, and at the same time exhibit the master professional equipment wall, building a complete professional ecological chain from tools to processes to service providers.
Master Wan said that Master is the smallest unit in the home service industry, but it has the power to change the entire industry. Since its establishment in 2013, the platform has always been committed to promoting the construction of standardization, the most direct and important part of which is the professional education of master groups. The original intention of setting up the "Master Professionalization Experimental Base" is to cultivate professional quality, establish professional self-confidence, and help them clarify their career planning and realize their personal value. Only when the happiness of front-line service providers is improved, will the home service industry develop benignly.
In addition to regular training, Master Wan provides more comprehensive security for 2.6 million masters. At the same time, the platform launched the exclusive insurance "Master Accident Insurance" to cover personal accident losses in the process of service, and at the same time created the "Master Safety Day" to popularize safety education and knowledge for the master group, covering travel safety, work safety, information security, property safety, etc., so as to avoid the safety problems that may occur in the work and life scenarios of the master in an all-round way, and provide corresponding solutions.
In recent years, under the leadership of Internet platforms, traditional blue-collar groups have gradually transformed into service providers in the new era. The service providers in the new era have a relatively high level of education, strong learning ability, and pay attention to the improvement of self-ability and the realization of life value. In order to respond to the diversified and changing market demand, Master will take the initiative to improve service awareness, focus on user needs, optimize service experience from timeliness, quality, attitude and other aspects, and enhance market competitiveness.
epilogue
At present, the domestic market is in the stage of upgrading the consumption structure, and has put forward deeper requirements for skilled talents and corresponding service platforms: on the one hand, advocate the spirit of craftsmen, cultivate service providers with high skills and a sense of professional belonging, and enhance the enthusiasm and creativity of service providers; on the other hand, continue to give full play to the advantages of information technology and platforms, track changes in consumer demand, shorten the user decision-making cycle through personalized and differentiated services, and thoroughly help consumers free their hands and enjoy life.
The platform economy has a lot to offer. The Internet service platform represented by Master Wan not only promotes domestic demand and expands employment, but also undertakes the educational responsibility of service providers and promotes the professional transformation of service providers in the new era, which is of great significance to the sustainable and healthy development of the home furnishing industry.