Every business day, incoming requests are routed through to the general task board where authorised SupaAgents handpick each task and establish contact with the relevant customer.
They may fulfill research-based requests like helping a customer look for a glass contractor, commerce-based requests like helping a business conduct consumer research or helping them find different billboard owners, all the way to fulfilling more administrative requests like copying contact details from name cards or transcribing a recording.
SupaAgents are expected to complete these tasks within a period of 24 hours but Mark Koh, the CEO and co-founder of Supahands, confidently claimed that they usually manage to turn them around within a couple of hours.
He also added that in the scenario that their SupaAgents don’t have the know-how or are unable to complete a given task, they will make sure that they find someone else who is capable of fulfilling the request.
Mark Koh leads Supahands, a virtual personal assistant service with a vision to make life easier and more meaningful for busy people around the world. Given that they operate in a largely competitive market with many different on-demand verticals, they have built a niche for themselves by solely specialising in fulfilling personal and business related administrative tasks along with database maintenance work.
Getting The Tedious Tasks Done
Supahands primarily caters to two main consumer groups, namely personal users and business users. Personal users tend to be entrepreneurs, busy executives, CEOs, and professionals who are usually time-poor or those who aren’t skilled or patient enough to carry out tasks such as data entry, lead generation, deduplicating a database, or running Excel functions.
On the other hand, business users such as Delivery Hero, KFit, Uber, Pomelo Fashion, among others outsource their tedious and repetitive tasks such as data entry, lead generation, product uploading, data deduplication, etc., to Supahands.
“Businesses definitely have stronger spending power and are less of an emotional buyer,” Mark said, explaining the differences between the two, “The individual customer is very important to Supahands as it helps with PR, improving the ‘emotional’ side of the business and creating a more complete product to serve both businesses and personal users alike.”
Both consumer groups tend to use the service daily, as their work happens to be repetitive in nature. Such users can make use of Supahand’s various subscription plans rather than paying per request, which is also a valid option. “We’re here to save them time; if we have to bill them each time we complete a task we’re just wasting their time,” Mark said.
This Is How SupaAgents Are Made
Supahands currently runs on close to a 10-member team, and they have over a hundred SupaAgents under their stable. SupaAgents are in essence, the foot soldiers that are responsible for liaising with users and for completing each and every one of their requests. They work closely with their project managers who have a bird’s-eye view of all the incoming requests, and they’re also able to view all of the SupaAgents’ boards. This helps them drill down on each individual task and it helps them control the quality of work that’s being done.
Project managers are responsible for ensuring the overall quality of work that SupaAgents engage in. In order to help them achieve this, they’re promptly notified so that they can identify tasks that weren’t completed within the deadline. And they’re also notified every time a user gives their agent a 3-star rating or below.
“The team understands work has to be done timely and to the highest quality possible. Everyone in the team has experience working in operations so that we can pick up extra demand when needed,” Mark claimed. “We are all about teamwork. If someone is off sick, we make sure that there’s someone to cover for that person to ensure continuity in serving our users and so that users don’t face a disruption.”
In order to keep up with the steadily growing number of user requests, Supahands continues to grow their stable of agents on a weekly basis by hiring passionate and excited people who believe in their business model. Also many of their new hires happen to be recommended by their current teammates.
However, potential hires are required to complete 3 trial tasks, during which they’ll be assessed on their ability to conduct appropriate research, their command of the English Language, and their ability to think procedurally and logically. If they’re successful, they’ll be invited for a video interview where they will be further assessed based on their verbal skills and whether they’re a good fit for Supahands by a project manager. If they’re selected, they’ll be trained on the job and they’ll work closely with a project manager who will guide all their efforts.
Sustainability, Growth & Domination
Supahands operates in a highly competitive industry with other personal concierge services like Be Malas, Helpr, Neon Runner, among others. These alternative services cater to a given niche and compete to dominate a particular vertical. Neon Runner for example is growing to dominate the vertical of on-ground runners and dispatchers while Be Malas and Helpr are catered towards the everyday consumer.
Given that Supahands has been operating in the personal and business related administrative tasks vertical for the past two years, they’ve worked with thousands of small and medium sized businesses, and they’ve also fulfilled numerous requests for their personal users.
According to their website, collectively they’ve fulfilled over 19,000 requests for their clients last year, at the time of this writing, and they grew their user base to 8,000 registered users in 2015. They also managed to release an iOS version of their app last year and they’re currently working on an Android release.
Mark believes that the industry will continue to grow and that we will see lots of new players within the same space. “On-demand services are here to grow as people become more aware of how they can better use their time,” he added.
He believes that Supahands’ innovation and their expertise are the two keys that will help them maintain their competitive edge within the industry. This year, they are also working towards expanding their service to markets like Singapore and Australia. As such, they’re hiring key individuals from a diverse range of industries that will help fulfill their overall vision and their growth strategy.
“As users of our own product we are building something that will help us streamline our lives and our businesses. We work hard to make our product more user friendly, automated and affordable,” he said.