Online Marketplaces: Customer Education

How do you approach customer education?

There are a couple of ways. Primarily, everything is on the site so we try and do everything on the website, a lot of content. Then we do a lot of emails, we do a lot of stuff on social media. For the consultation, we do pre-reading material. We try and make everything clear during the consultation and then post-consultation. There will always be a need for manual intervention. Primarily, it’s a doctor. Because they have interaction with the doctor, we work with the doctor to say, if you’re not going to give them medication, please explain it. Don’t just say no. I’ll always use amoxycillin as an example, because that’s actually the most popular one. But if somebody says, I’ve got this pain and I need amoxycillin to fix me, the first person we depend on is the clinician to say, this condition doesn’t require it. Amoxycillin is an antibiotic; the more you use it, the less resistant you will be to it when you have a more severe condition. It’s just that piece on educating the consumer there.

If that doesn’t work, then our team get involved. It will either be our clinical team or it will be our call center team. Our call center team and our clinical team, it’s actually the first time I’ve had to do this too, we’ve really had to get the call center and the clinical team, as one, to such a point that we have nurses in the call center, as well. It’s very much making sure that the call center knows what they can advise, to the point where they say, look, we can see that this wasn’t the right medication for you and really educate the consumers on that. It’s something that’s new in this market but, again, it’s life and death. Some people think that I exaggerate it, but I use that example all the time. It could be as small; it could be as big. It’s life and death.

We have this lovely red button, as well, which is my favorite button. When we’re uncomfortable, whether it be the doctor, whether it be the staff, whoever, there’s a red button that gets pressed which, ultimately alerts the ambulance and alerts everybody to say, this is an emergency on platform. For me, that’s been massive. The amount of times we’ve had to use that, we’ve had people who were on the brink of suicide and have said, had it not been for this red button we would probably have killed ourselves. It’s things such as, I want this medication; I need it to feel better. People can do stuff on that and the doctor physically sees how you are getting out of control. Press that red button, we all follow up and then we send an ambulance over and then you can see that that person was close to doing something. No matter how big or how small, we always say, it’s life and death.

Food wasn’t life and death and beauty certainly wasn’t life and death. At that time in Treatwell, we’d had 85% to 90% of female customers and they would say, you just don’t understand how important this is. But towards the end of my time at Treatwell, we spent a lot of time on male grooming. Actually now, the men are getting a lot more aware of grooming.