On June 24, 2023, the last day of the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, when the investigation results of the "6.21 Yinchuan Barbecue Restaurant Explosion Accident" were brushed, Mao Xiaojun bounced up from his seat and felt like he had been shot.
"The clerk replaced the pressure reducing valve connected to the liquefied gas tank without authorization, which caused the liquefied gas in the liquefied gas tank to leak quickly, causing an explosion. ”
Exiting the announcement page with white letters on a blue background, he made a phone call to Alipay's product colleagues and chatted passionately for more than an hour, to the effect that the safety of bottled gas was, in the final analysis, a matter of safety awareness.
The next day, he sat in the conference room with Nan Xiujuan, the person in charge of Bottle An Gas (Hangzhou) Internet of Things Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Bottle Safety"). Bottle Safety Gas is a company that provides an operation management platform for the bottled liquefied gas industry. It and other companies that help all walks of life go digital and bring various life services to Alipay are collectively referred to as "digital service providers" by the platform.
This is not the first time that Mao Xiaojun and Nan Xiujuan have talked about how to use digitalization to solve the problem of bottled gas safety, and the two brainstormed, silenced and argued. The scenery outside the office building makes them particularly small.
They are all too common in the vigorous narrative of the digital age. We don't know much about the group of digital service providers, but what is certain is that "invisible" in the cracks of the digital age is full of the strength and resilience to try to change their professional vision.
"Many people think that gas cylinders are unsafe and should be banned, but are small restaurant owners unwilling to use safer piped natural gas?"
The answer, of course, is not. The one-time investment in installing a set of pipeline gas equipment is high, and the business is difficult to do, so the bosses of small businesses prefer to choose more flexible and convenient gas cylinders. And even if you use piped gas, if you don't have good gas habits, the risk is not small.
As the business manager of digital energy payment of Alipay's digital livelihood division, Mao Xiaojun's main job is to figure out where there is still room for digitalization in this industry. He had envisioned a payment process to regulate the safety of gas cylinders.
In 2023, he took this plan to visit a number of bottled gas service providers to seek cooperation, but the results were discouraging: under the squeeze of pipeline gas, the living space of bottled gas continued to shrink. "People don't see the prospects and money, so they won't consider doing digital upgrades. ”
From a more downstream perspective, gas delivery workers are generally older, or young people with a low level of education inherit their father's business, and tricycles pull nearly 1,000 catties of gas cylinders to form a barrier, making it difficult to deepen digitalization.
When he met Nan Xiujuan, Mao Xiaojun had been running for several months for this matter, and the progress was slow. That day, in the conference room of bottle safety, when Nan Xiujuan showed Mao Xiaojun a product of the company for user education, he was immediately interested.
"What does this app do?" asked Mao Xiaojun, pointing to Nan Xiujuan's mobile phone.
Nan Xiujuan knows that 21 days to develop a habit, so the company's products have made an App specifically for gas cylinder users, reminding users to close the valve, close the valve and get points for redeeming prizes, hoping to help merchants develop safe operation habits in this way.
Nan Xiujuan has been doing this business for seven or eight years, and her tentacles are deep, she said: "90% of gas safety accidents now are obviously caused by people's carelessness, not because of product quality." Leakage alarms, shut-off valves are all early warning after leakage, improve people's safety awareness, through people's simple actions - close the gas cylinder angle valve casually, do not create conditions for leakage is the root of the problem.
Looking back, changing an industry doesn't require great technology, but it does need to hit the pain points of the industry, and the process is like playing the piano in a dark room and figuring out that accurate note.
Inspired by Nan Xiujuan, Mao Xiaojun adjusted his direction and "made a fuss about people".
He pointed out that the threshold for the promotion of the APP is too high, and there is a light way to use the Alipay applet to combine the product capabilities of Sesame Credit, message reminders, ant adventure, etc., to help gas users cultivate safety awareness and habits through popular science learning, punching cards and other operations.
Merchants open the door to check, close the store and close the valve, use Alipay to scan the QR code on the cylinder and other information to take photos and records, if it is operated by the clerk, the inspection information will also be pushed to the store owner through Alipay messages.
Mao Xiaojun talked about the Chongqing gas fraud incident since April, 141,000 households need to read meters at home, and only 18 meter readers are allocated, but if the data is true and traceable, it can greatly avoid wrong banknotes, missed readings, and multiple copies.
Ant Adventure is a small program for answering questions from Alipay Security Center, where the safety knowledge of bottled gas is introduced into the question bank, and with the short and concise popular science video, compared with the previous direct distribution of safety education knowledge to merchants, the viewing time of the new way is guaranteed, and the questionnaire can also be recovered.
On April 23, in the documentary "Digital Ferryman" filmed by Alipay for digital service providers, there is a ramen restaurant owner who is not very literate, but fortunately, there is a video that can be checked against it. He watched the video and learned it more than a dozen times, and said that he could finally sleep well at night, otherwise he would not worry about whether the valve was closed. ”
At the moment of breaking through the pain points of the industry, it is the core competitiveness of a service provider as a latecomer. In March this year, the relevant departments of Shanghai designated the Alipay Mini Program of "Bottle Safety Gas" as the only online safety education platform for all shops on the street.
Nan Xiujuan was deeply touched, her previous orders were all run by people, she never thought that this kind of good thing would fall to her small company of more than a dozen people. Now, this product has gradually become her stepping stone.
"A person ran a fitness card of 100,000 yuan 10 years ago, and everyone would evaluate him for being rich and self-disciplined, but the same thing happened 10 years later, and the evaluation that this person received may be negative. Talking about the current situation of the domestic fitness industry, Chen Wei made a very realistic assumption.
Before taking over Alipay's fitness business, Chen Wei had never set foot in any commercial key room because he refused to apply for a membership card, and only exercised in the gym in the company's park. "There's a joke that if you cut leeks in the gym, you can cut one by one. ”
In 2021, after becoming the head of fitness in Alipay's ecological business department, he went to gyms in almost all first-tier cities to do fieldwork, and he wanted to know what Alipay could do for this industry.
The rivers and lakes are deep.
Chen Wei chose to use a stupid method to count the number of people outside the turnstile in the gym, sometimes from afternoon to evening. More detailed things, such as how to have a group class, choosing equipment, getting parking coupons, getting bracelets, buying water, guests running on the treadmill, he came to the side to chat. "Except for not owning a gym, I know pretty much everything. ”
After "sinking to the bottom", he discovered that the fitness industry was not as glamorous as it should. Take the yoga industry as an example, the average education of the boss is not high, and the management ability is limited. Asking a pre-sale company to help attract new members to apply for cards has become the most common practice in the yoga industry, and sales expenses have become the largest cost.
During the peak period, the pre-sale company can bring in millions of card charging income, which is like riding a roller coaster of wealth for yoga studio owners. However, the money charged by the member card cannot be regarded as the profit of the yoga studio, and even the debt is accurate, once the new members cannot be pulled, the salary cannot be paid, the cash flow is broken, the model collapses, and the boss runs away. In the long run, criminals have also derived a money-making model.
Chen Wei spent seven or eight months in the gym and worked with service providers to develop a set of solutions that included seven or eight Alipay products, involving the entire supply chain such as physical test reports, vending and equipment manufacturers.
However, he hit a wall with the service provider.
He thought it would be an extreme pioneering, but the service providers were more concerned about whether they could make money, whether they could help merchants make money?
"What merchants have to solve is a problem of survival. The person who said this was the founder of Xi'an Hebi Information Technology Co., Ltd., Zhou Jian.
Chen Wei first met Zhou Jian in 2022, when Zhou Jian had just moved the company back to his hometown in Anshan, and there was no place to put his feet in the office, so they made an appointment at the western restaurant next to the company.
"When the industry is down, I want to see if there is light in his eyes. As for why there is light, I can't answer. Chen Wei said.
As with the fitness industry, service providers in this industry are also trapped, and a common development system originated in Japan, but due to a lack of innovation, it has been frequently copied, and quotations have tended to be free. Service providers urgently need to make a difference in order to stand out from the market, and the resources invested by Alipay have become a new opportunity.
Chen Wei described the cooperation with Zhou Jian as "flying close to the ground", from Zhou Jian, he understands how to place the understanding of the merchant in the framework at the bottom, and how to convey it in layers of details.
In Alipay's documentary "Digital Ferryman", Zhou Jian talked about one thing, and he also told Chen Wei that once he talked to a yoga studio owner about the system, and after talking for a long time, he found that the boss's computer was not powered on, and the usual appointment records were also recorded in the notebook.
"In such a primitive industry, we think that this thing must be immediately valuable to service providers, immediately valuable to merchants, and immediately valuable to the industry. So we focus on a point and press down like a pin. Chen Wei said.
This pushpin is to connect Sesame Credit and other capabilities to the Alipay applet of the yoga studio, users with more than 550 points of Sesame Credit not only do not need to buy a card at one time, they can pay monthly, they can also pay after class, and if they are not satisfied, they can also apply for a refund, dispelling consumers' concerns about the boss running away.
After the plan was decided, they were ready to pilot it in a yoga studio in Jiangsu, which was not so much a pilot as a dead horse as a live horse doctor. New stores are opening around the store, creating constant competition for it, and the departure of employees has taken away instructors, leaving the yoga studio in a desperate state. During that time, Zhou Jian always received calls urging from this boss.
Soon after the plan landed, the store's membership conversion rate increased to 35%, and it was brought back to life.
Now, the ambitious Zhou Jian is "touring the country", "I want more and more owners to use this plan!" Chen Wei sees a kind of vitality in it, "Even if I leave Alipay one day, this product will continue to go." ”
The success of the "Hebi model" has led many people to comment that Chen Wei seized the opportunity, but he believes that the soil is far more important than the seeds. "Seeds germinate when exposed to water, but whether they can grow into big trees is determined by the soil. ”
With the advent of the digital era of the service industry, consumers' needs tend to be diversified and personalized, and the digitalization of businesses has also entered the "deep water area". Alipay has more than 1 billion users, open product capabilities, and continuous resource investment, which is undoubtedly a fertile soil.
In April 2022, Alipay launched the "Ride the Wind Plan". Liu Jingyao, the relevant person in charge of the ecological growth and operation of Alipay's ecological business department, said that the earliest prototype of the "Chengfeng Plan" was two words on the blackboard in the conference room: service provider and companionship.
Among them, the "service provider" is determined, because in the digital blue ocean, only by relying on the service provider can the non-standardized digital technology and products that meet the personalized needs of merchants be finally brought to the hands of merchants.
Before writing "accompaniment", there are a series of nouns: incentive, rebate, diversion. The discussion lasted for several days, and finally these accessibility features were set aside to reveal the undertones of "companionship".
Alipay tries to accompany service providers to explore the optimal path of digital commerce, and while lowering the digital threshold for merchants, service providers have also achieved business transformation and increased customer revenue.
At this point, Zhou Jian, who is a combination, has a deep experience. In August 2022, after the new product plan was determined, Hebi carried out conference marketing for the first time. In the preparatory stage, Chen Wei often accompanied Zhou Jiangai PPT until the early hours of the morning.
In addition, Alipay will select the annual excellent list from a series of service provider programs every year, and issue an annual cash reward of one million, and Zhou Jian is the first winner of the "Million Award".
On the day of the award, Zhou Jian cried. Chen Wei was not at the scene at the time, and when he heard the news, the same picture as Zhou Jian appeared in his mind: in the conference room in the early morning, there were several green beer bottles standing next to the computer, and two men with thinning hair, their blood boiling.
Whether it is Zhou Jian on the stage or other service providers off the stage, in Liu Jingyao's view, they all have a sense of responsibility and are doing things out of a sense of mission in the industry, "Business is one thing, but they all hope to make the industry change for the better, even a little bit." ”
But with vision comes difficulties, this group rarely really stands in the spotlight, and survival and profitability are the big issues hanging over the heads of this group. Alipay hopes that excellent solutions will be seen and potential solutions will be supported, and it has spent a year filming the documentary "Digital Ferryman" for the service provider.
Chen Wei said that Zhou Jian in the lens is a little different from usual, with a mature plan, he exudes unshakable confidence, "It seems that the light in his eyes is brighter." And Nan Xiujuan has been anxious about forwarding the copy for a long time, this is the first time she has faced the circle, "I am very grateful to be able to be understood by ordinary people about what I do." ”
In the documentary, Li Yongjian, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Financial and Economic Strategy, said: China's service providers are relatively small and scattered. About 50% of the service providers (companies) have less than 10 employees. Of the more than 100 million small and medium-sized enterprises, 80% are in the initial stage of digitalization, and the potential is particularly large. Taking the Alipay platform as an example, the number of entire service providers may have doubled.
Throughout 2023, Alipay will invest tens of billions of financial resources to support this group of "ferrymen" of convenient digital services. Among them, the "Wind Riding Plan" alone has helped the merchants of service providers to achieve an average monthly growth of 1.5 times the average operating GMV.
Such a fast-developing digital era is like a blue ocean, half of the tide, half of the undercurrent, inseparable from a group of bitter and cool service providers, some of them hold the penny, some paddle, ride the wind, and ferry between the Alipay platform, users and merchants.
Many times, they are a supporting role in the process, but with the support of the platform, everyone can find their own place, find their own posture and vitality.