Perhaps the only thing more buzzworthy in recent business news than “the gig economy” – the onset of crowdsourced jobs for tasks from day labor to restaurant work to walking a dog – is the talk of the sputtering of the gig economy. Startup after startup arrived on the scene flush with big name patrons, venture capital backing and much fanfare, but it wasn’t long before the perils of this new business model consumed many of them.
Low pay and heavy on-call demands robbed these temp workers of a lot of their incentive to provide excellent service to the customers they were obliged to serve. This, in turn, resulted in less than stellar feedback from disappointed customers. Eventually, repeat customers became sparse and revenue dwindled further, causing many to shutter or pivot to different, more traditional business models entirely.
While the gig economy is here to stay, finding the right solution for your business today that is also stable enough to work for you tomorrow and beyond can be quite challenging.
The key is realizing that your business can’t rely upon crowdsourcing as a general solution. You need your own enterprise crowd enabled and flexible enough to meet seasonal demand spikes and varying labor and delivery scenarios. Imagine being able to tap into your existing workforce to grow beyond traditional crowdsourcing labor solutions. Now imagine that you could easily and efficiently establish different private (your workforce) and public (outside personnel) crowds that could be flexed up and down at any time to meet varying demand levels.
Finally, imagine that all of this could be done through an easy-to-use mobile app powered by a scalable platform like nothing else. That would give your business a one-of-a-kind foothold in the gig economy, with the stability to avoid the land mines that doom so many other solutions.
Devising innovative, multi-purpose software solutions is what separates the companies who will shape crowdsourcing going forward from the fly-by-night operations that live and die by ever-evolving trends.
Be sure to align your business with partners who are fully prepared to lead, rather than follow and fall behind.