allows Angie’s List to keep track of address-specific repairs and maintenance—much like a Carfax for houses—so current and future homeowners can know what was done when. And tapping into the data generated by “smart” home products can help to spur ongoing updates and improvements.
“We have the ability to deliver delight across that whole end-to-end experience,” Durchslag said. “No one else is focused on that. They’re all focused on that search-and-match thing at the very beginning.”
Capturing individual users’ preferences and analyzing past behavior allows Angie’s List to provide more personalized, relevant options for each member, the company said—regardless of whether they’re motivated by price, convenience, or quality.
“If I know something about you, and I know something about the occasion with which you’re coming—and I can know that from where you’ve been around the Internet and where you’ve been around our site—well, then I know which flow to take you through,” Durchslag said. “If you just want a great deal, I’ll take you through our e-commerce flow. If you just care about convenience, I’ll take you through our lead-feed flow. And if you’re a data monger who cares about quality, I’ll take you through our core search experience that has all of the content and all of the reviews and all of the external data feed.”
“But I couldn’t do any of that without technology,” he said. “I couldn’t know what you want, and I couldn’t deliver it.”
Angie’s List plans to take the rest of 2016 to focus on “the basic blocking and tackling of delivering a good online experience,” Durchslag said. Phase 2 of the company’s profitable-growth plan calls for leveraging the home-services platform in new ways, such as handling real-time booking for service providers. To ensure the best ideas surface, the company also will make a set of application programming interfaces and software developer kits available on the platform.
Durchslag is trying to revitalize the company in a new era of online services and user experience. “The biggest constraint is one of imagination,” he said. “But we can harness talent from all over the world, and they’re going to come up with some ideas that we didn’t come up with. And when they get on the platform, we can see which ones have traction with consumers. That creates a freedom of innovation … that will be completely to the benefit of our consumers.”