Asha Sharma, COO of Porch, on the future of customer communications

Asha Sharma, COO of Porch, on the future of customer communications

(Asha Sharma is a keynote speaker at SIGNAL, Twilio’s developer conference)

Some websites have great inspiration but no professionals. Other sites have professionals but no reviews from neighbors or friends. In general, there is a lot of information available but nobody had organized inspiration, project data, or word-of-mouth referrals in one place.

In 2012, Porch sought to tackle this problem. Today, with over 3.2 million professionals and over 130 million projects, Porch is a marketplace that enables homeowners to make smart home improvement decisions by giving them the information they need to find the right professionals, get inspiration, and manage their home.

As one of the earliest employees, Asha Sharma, now Chief Operating Officer of Porch,  helped build Porch from the ground up across the development of revenue streams, the brand, the product, and talent. Allowing communications to streamline the conversation between homeowners and home professionals is one of the ways that Porch creates a differentiated customer experience.

Here is a quick Q&A on her thoughts regarding the future of communications and how it pertains to developers creating that experience:

When it comes to differentiating customer experiences, what is the role of communications? 
For customers, communication should happen seamlessly – if it’s noticeable in the customer experience, there is most likely inefficiency somewhere along their journey.

What is the role of the developer as it relates to architecting differentiation? 
At Porch.com, we have a regularly scheduled designated “dev day” where developers periodically get to work on whatever interests them in the scope of the business. We encourage developers go in, get their hands dirty, and explore the capabilities of these tools, then leave it up to them to create solutions unique to our customers.

What challenges have you encountered when it comes to enabling customer communications?
In a perfect world, the ultimate goal is to be able to connect homeowners with professionals right away, all the time. But one of the challenges that our industry has historically faced is making real-time one to one connections between customers and professionals. Aligning preferred communication mediums such as email, text, and calling with scheduling differences can be a real issue.

What do you envision as the future of customer communications?
For us in the home improvement space, language and industry terminology can create a communication barrier between professionals and homeowners. I think in the future, live video capabilities would be able to help bridge that gap and help jobs get completed.

Join us at SIGNAL to hear more from Asha Sharma on how companies can create a differentiated customer experience with communications.