Tkram

About the project

In most Syrian homes, finding a plumber or an electrician still starts with a phone number a neighbour recommends. Nobody knows the price until the worker is at the door, there is no way to check the reputation of a stranger, and nothing written down if the appointment slips or the job is left half finished. On the other side, small repair workshops run their schedules and their technicians on a notebook and a string of phone calls, and lose customers simply because nobody picked up in time. Tkram pulls all of that into one place. A homeowner opens the app, picks what they need — plumbing, electrical work, cleaning, air conditioning, carpentry, painting, appliance repair, furniture moving — sets an address and a time, and sees the cost before confirming. From there they follow the request until it is finished, then leave a rating. Workshop owners get their own app to receive requests, hand them to their technicians, and keep an eye on their jobs, earnings and reports. Technicians get a simpler app showing the day's assignments, the addresses, and a direct line to the customer. What makes the practical difference is that everything is written in Arabic and laid out right to left, not bolted onto a foreign interface. The price is stated before confirmation with no surprise fees, and every provider has a profile carrying ratings from earlier customers. Alerts arrive the moment a request is accepted or a technician is on the way, and in-app messaging settles the small details without a phone call. There is also a wallet, loyalty points, discount coupons, a refer-a-friend scheme, and a favourites list for people whose work you liked. For jobs that cannot be priced in advance, the customer describes what they need and several providers send back offers to choose from. The biggest challenge was that no two cities behave the same way: the services, prices and providers available in Damascus are not the ones available in Latakia or Tartus. That was handled by splitting the service area into zones, so a customer only sees what can actually be delivered where they live. Inside the company, each staff member has permissions defining what they can view and change, keeping customer data and accounts in a small number of hands. Alongside the apps, a public website was built with a page for every city and every service, so people find Tkram through their everyday web searches. The three apps, the website and the control panel — where the company manages services, providers, bookings, promotions and reviews — are all built. The project is now in the run-up to public launch, starting with six cities: Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Latakia, Hama and Tartus, with further expansion planned after that.