After a top-down rebranding earlier this year, home services platform Angi (nee Angie’s List) is doubling down in digital by bringing former Twitter Data Leader Ercan Kamber onboard as its first chief data officer to accelerate its “efforts to strategically leverage data for the organization.”
Speaking with PYMNTS, Kamber said his Twitter and Microsoft experiences will be come in handy as he creates new teams to build out the home services platform as an online ecosystem that knows your house better than you do.
“Data doesn’t turn into business value or customer experience value without creating world class teams, and the experience that will be most useful in Angi’s case will be building a vision for data and then [achieving] that vision for data by building teams that can do all the things that they want for our customers and improve customer experiences,” Kamber said.
Those data teams that literally delve into the plumbing of a house, are what Kamber calls “the secret sauce” for his plans to take artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics to the next level.
“You need to look at the customer value that you’re trying to improve,” he said, adding that “there’s always a path [to] customer experience that data can connect, [and] not having that dedicated perspective is the missing link.”
Kamber said he intends to create those connections using the roughly 30 million service requests a year coming through the Angi platform, serviced by 250,000 professionals from contractors to roofers to a universe of home remodeling experts that are discoverable on Angi.
See also: Angie’s List Rebrands; Will Focus on Enhanced Mobile, Online Service
Predictive Analytics and Home Projects Unite
Since early 2020, millions of people have moved to remote work, with those extra hours at home triggering the realization that improvements need to be done. But consumers often need help deciding what projects to take on before they even get to the point of seeking professionals to do the work.
“Even though we own our home, we don’t know much about our homes,” Kamber said. “Helping us to know [more] about our homes and connecting that data with service providers can do a lot of good for homeowners, as well as maintenance of the home.”
Kamber said one goal of his new role is to be able to use customer input on projects they’re just contemplating and combine it with repeat customer data to give Angi a new predictive analytics capability that will enable timely personalization of offers.
In other words, Angi could know you need a new roof long before it becomes a costlier problem and send out notifications which would, in turn, motivate homeowners to seek bids on the project.
“Getting that information [can take] multiple steps and multiple interactions with both sides of the market, [the] homeowner and service provider,” he said. “We can shrink those [interactions].”
“We have repeat customers coming to Angi for multiple needs,” he added. “They may be coming for home cleaning needs, and later on they may be coming for their windows, they may be coming for the roof. We provide all these services, and we can connect those services and information together” using the company’s vast dataset to “shrink” inefficiencies in this process.
Read also: Lowe’s, Home Depot Court Big-Spending Pro Contractors as DIY Takes a Breather
Bringing Digital Efficiency to Home Remodeling
Addressing what he calls “an imbalance of information between homeowners and service providers,” Kamber said he is setting out to make Angi a kind of connected aid for the home itself.
Pointing again to how little the average homeowner actually knows about the state of everything from their appliances to windows — never mind the vanity projects many would like to pursue in their backyards or basements — Kamber told PYMNTS, “Homeowners do not know what type of service they need. They may not know what factors [go] into the pricing, which might be central and important information. As you get more and more data, you can bridge these things and prevent unnecessary information exchanges. You can more accurately support people. There’s no need to go back and forth in negotiations, which nobody likes.”
“It needs to be a seamless and frictionless experience,” he added. “Data can play a central part.”
Few homeowners look at a remodeling project as something that data can make less expensive and more satisfying, but that’s precisely how Kamber said he sees Angi operationalizing its data.
“Data will be central to get the teams right in terms of inefficiencies … and the time wasted on back and forth between the homeowners and the service providers,” he said. “We will aim for both of those, and that will lead to efficiency in multiple ways” whether it’s time to job completion all the way to customer satisfaction with the services they’ve paid for.
While brand new to the role, Kamber said he has has an ambitious agenda for what the Angi ecosystem will be capable of in the near future as he puts data teams in place, focused on predictive analytics.
See also: Kukun Remodels Home Improvement Data to Expand Into InsurTech
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