The Service Economy’s Discovery Problem

Why finding the right professional remains harder than buying almost anything else online

By Thomas O’Donoghue, Founder of Workily

Technology has transformed how we buy products, arrange travel and consume entertainment. Within minutes, we can compare hotels in another country, order food, purchase insurance or book a flight.

Finding the right professional is often a very different experience.

A person looking for an accountant, solicitor, tutor, photographer, therapist, cleaner, consultant or tradesperson may still have to search through directories, examine websites of varying quality, ask for recommendations in a Facebook group and contact several providers without knowing whether any are available or genuinely suitable.

This is not a small or peripheral part of the economy. It is one of its largest components.

According to the Central Statistics Office, services accounted for approximately 62% of active Irish enterprises and 61% of the people employed in Ireland’s structural business economy in 2022. Services also generated 47% of its turnover and gross value added. By 2023, SMEs represented 99.8% of Irish enterprises, while micro-enterprises employing fewer than ten people accounted for 92.6% of businesses. CSO: Business in Ireland 2022 and CSO: Business in Ireland 2023.

Ireland is therefore not simply a country of consumers looking for services. It is a country of thousands of small, independent service providers trying to become visible to those consumers.

Yet the infrastructure connecting the two remains remarkably underdeveloped.

An economy that is digital—but not fully connected

Ireland’s consumers are highly digitally engaged. In 2025, 95% of households had internet access, while 92% of internet users used the internet to find information about goods or services. The same year, 85% purchased goods or services online. CSO: Internet Coverage and Usage in Ireland 2025 and CSO: Household Digital Consumer Behaviour 2025.

However, these figures combine very different types of transactions.

Booking accommodation, ordering a takeaway or buying concert tickets is not the same as selecting a family-law solicitor, finding a tutor for a child who is struggling with mathematics or deciding whom to trust with a major home renovation.

The CSO reported that 41.7% of Irish service-sector enterprises conducted sales over the internet in 2025. That demonstrates substantial progress, but it also means that most service enterprises were not recording internet sales. CSO: Information Society Statistics—Enterprises 2025.

More importantly, an online sale does not necessarily indicate that the difficult part of the customer journey has been solved. A consumer may still have spent hours researching, comparing and contacting providers before the transaction occurred.

The unresolved challenge is not merely enabling payment. It is helping someone move confidently from having a problem to engaging the appropriate professional.

People begin with problems, not professional categories

In my experience building Workily, one of the most important lessons has been that consumers do not naturally think in service categories.

They think in situations:

• • “Water is coming through the ceiling.”

• • “My child is falling behind at school.”

• • “I have started earning rental income and do not know what I need to declare.”

• • “My employer is changing my contract.”

• • “I need someone to photograph an event, but I do not understand the different packages.”

• • “I want to improve my website, but I do not know whether I need a designer, developer or marketer.”

The conventional digital model asks the customer to translate that situation into an industry category before the platform can help.

That is often the first failure.

A customer may not know whether a damp problem requires a plumber, roofer, ventilation specialist or building surveyor. A business owner may not know whether a problem requires an accountant, solicitor, financial adviser or business consultant. Someone seeking help with a website may use “web designer” as a catch-all term for several very different skills.

Search engines and traditional directories largely assume that the customer already understands the solution. Frequently, they do not.

This is why I believe the next generation of service platforms must be organised around problems and intended outcomes—not simply around business categories and postcodes.

The five frictions of service discovery

The service-discovery problem can be understood through five distinct points of friction.

1. Definition

The customer must first define what has happened, what outcome is required and what kind of expertise may be relevant.

This sounds straightforward, but it can be extremely difficult when the customer has limited technical or professional knowledge.

An incorrect initial definition can send the customer towards the wrong category of provider and waste time for everyone involved.

2. Discovery

The customer must then identify potential professionals.

Google, social media, directories, advertisements, local groups and personal recommendations all play a role. However, each operates according to a different logic.

Search engines tend to reward businesses with strong websites, established domain authority, effective search optimisation or advertising budgets. Social platforms reward engagement and content production. Directories may prioritise paying members. Personal recommendations are trusted but restricted by the experience and networks of the person being asked.

None of these mechanisms necessarily identifies the professional most suitable for the particular customer.

3. Evaluation

Once several possibilities have been found, the customer must assess competence, trustworthiness and suitability.

This is where online reviews have become disproportionately important.

Comparable Irish research is limited, but evidence from the UK illustrates the scale of their influence. The UK Competition and Markets Authority reports that 89% of consumers use online reviews when researching a product or service and estimates that reviews may influence as much as £23 billion in consumer spending annually. UK Government: CMA action on fake reviews.

Reviews can be helpful, but they are a blunt instrument.

A five-star rating does not necessarily tell a customer whether the professional has handled this particular type of problem, serves their location, is accepting new work, holds the necessary qualifications or is suitable for the desired budget.

The growing problem of fabricated and manipulated reviews has also attracted regulatory attention. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission introduced a rule prohibiting fake reviews, undisclosed insider reviews, review suppression and the purchase of positive or negative reviews. US Federal Trade Commission: Final Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials.

Trust cannot be reduced to an average score.

4. Engagement

Even after identifying a seemingly suitable professional, the customer often cannot see availability, likely cost, response times or preferred method of contact.

They submit a form, leave a voicemail or send a message and wait.

Professionals face the reverse problem. They may receive vague enquiries with insufficient information, requests outside their location or expertise, and messages from people contacting several providers simultaneously.

While developing Workily across more than 200 service categories, I have become increasingly convinced that a single engagement model cannot work for every service.

A cleaning appointment may be suitable for fixed pricing and direct booking. A legal matter may require an initial paid consultation. A creative project needs a discussion about style and scope. A building problem may need diagnosis before anyone can estimate the cost. An emergency prioritises immediate availability over almost every other factor.

Treating all these journeys as equivalent creates friction rather than removing it.

5. Assurance

Finally, both parties need confidence that the engagement will proceed as expected.

The customer wants to know what is included, what it will cost and what happens if something goes wrong. The professional needs a clear brief, a committed customer and an agreed method of payment.

Many platforms consider their role complete once contact details have been exchanged. I believe that is too narrow.

An introduction is not an outcome.

The meaningful measures should be whether the customer reached an appropriate professional, whether the professional received a viable opportunity and whether the underlying problem moved towards resolution.

The best professional may be the least visible

As a lecturer in digital marketing, I understand why online visibility matters. Businesses need clear positioning, useful content, accurate information and credible signals of expertise.

But building a service marketplace has also reinforced a limitation in digital marketing that deserves more attention:

The ability to market a service and the ability to deliver it are different capabilities.

The professional who appears first in search results may be excellent. They may also simply be better at search optimisation, advertising or content creation than their competitors.

Meanwhile, an exceptional tutor, accountant, therapist, photographer or tradesperson may depend almost entirely on referrals. They may have weak website content, an incomplete business profile and little interest in creating social-media posts. They can be highly capable and almost digitally invisible at the same time.

This creates a structural imbalance. Consumers struggle to find suitable professionals, while good professionals struggle to be discovered unless they also become competent digital marketers.

It is one reason I do not believe the solution is simply to give consumers a longer list.

More choice is only valuable when people possess the information and confidence needed to evaluate it.

The independent professional’s second job

The discovery problem also imposes a hidden burden on professionals.

A self-employed professional is rarely responsible only for delivering their expertise. They must also generate leads, maintain a website, answer enquiries, prepare quotations, manage appointments, request reviews, create social content, collect payment and maintain profiles across multiple platforms.

The scale of this independent economy is particularly visible in the United States. The US Census Bureau recorded 29.8 million non-employer businesses—businesses without paid employees—generating approximately $1.7 trillion in receipts in 2022. US Census Bureau: The Nation’s Smallest Businesses.

Ireland is obviously much smaller, but its exceptionally high proportion of micro-enterprises points to the same underlying challenge: the economy depends heavily on small organisations with limited time and administrative capacity.

A platform that sends professionals more low-quality enquiries may increase their workload without improving their income.

The objective should not be to generate the largest possible number of leads. It should be to create fewer, better and more appropriate opportunities.

Why the problem has survived

Product e-commerce succeeded partly because products can usually be described through standard attributes: size, colour, specification, delivery date and price.

Services are more difficult.

They are shaped by context, expertise, location, urgency, personality, availability and the relationship between customer and provider. In many cases, the service cannot be fully defined until a professional has examined the problem.

This makes the market difficult to standardise—but not impossible to improve.

The mistake has been trying to force every service into one of two models:

1. 1. a directory that presents a list of providers; or

1. 1. an e-commerce journey that assumes the service can be selected and purchased like a product.

The better model lies between them.

It should help the customer articulate the problem, determine the appropriate type of professional, select the correct engagement method and provide enough structured information for the professional to respond meaningfully.

From search engines to solution engines

Artificial intelligence has the potential to change the beginning of this process.

Instead of searching for a category, a person can describe a situation in ordinary language. AI can ask follow-up questions, identify urgency and suggest the type of expertise that may be required.

However, AI alone does not solve the entire journey.

It may help explain a problem, but it still needs reliable information about:

• • which professionals exist;

• • what they actually specialise in;

• • where they operate;

• • whether they are available;

• • what evidence supports their credibility;

• • what the engagement may cost;

• • whether advice should be delivered online or in person.

AI can improve interpretation and matching, but the underlying professional-service infrastructure must also improve.

If it does not, the result will simply be a more sophisticated interface placed on top of the same fragmented information.

Building for resolution rather than discovery

My original interest in Workily was practical: making it easier for people to find and engage professionals.

The longer I have worked on the problem, the more I have come to see it as something larger than a directory or booking challenge.

It is a problem of market design.

Customers need help defining what they require. Professionals need opportunities that reflect their expertise, location and availability. Both sides need better signals of trust. Different services require different forms of engagement. Platforms must eventually be judged on outcomes, not merely traffic, listings or leads generated.

That leads me to five principles for the future of professional-service discovery:

1. 1. Begin with the customer’s problem, not the platform’s categories.

1. 1. Measure suitability rather than merely proximity or popularity.

1. 1. Treat trust as contextual evidence, not a star rating.

1. 1. Allow different services to use different engagement models.

1. 1. Optimise for successful outcomes, not introductions.

The service economy is already digital in the sense that customers begin their search online. It is not yet truly connected.

The opportunity now is to move from helping people search for professionals to helping them resolve problems.

That distinction may define the next generation of service marketplaces.