Digital Consumer & Healthcare Marketplaces: GTM Strategies

I’d like to discuss this theme of customer focus and customer behavior at Just Eat, in terms of food delivery and restaurants and Treatwell, with beauty salons. What were the differences in customer behavior that you saw, that then drove a different go-to-market strategy?

The challenge that we had at Just Eat was, it was very, very reactive. What I mean by that is, you are hungry at six o’clock; you want your food at 6:45. We’ve got a 45-minute window from your order being made to the moment that it gets delivered at your door. It was very, very sensitive. People are grumpy when they’re hungry. If it’s meant to be there at 6:45 and it comes at 7:30 or 8:00, you get very, very grumpy customers. That, as a window, was what we always found challenging, in making sure we got that success rate. Actually, that was what really made Just Eat, in that we got that right more times that we got it wrong.

At Treatwell, the majority of customers do not sit there and say, “I need a haircut right now.” You plan your haircut, your manicure, your pedicure. You’ve got more time to make sure that the experience is good. I think, at Treatwell, the average time from an appointment to a booking was something like four days. You had a four-day window to sit there and say, we’ve got to make sure the experience is there.

I think with Push Doctor, as well, and healthcare, that it is also somewhat reactionary because you get two experiences. One, you wake up in the morning and you’re feeling sick and you want to see a doctor as soon as possible. Or the night before, you’re feeling sick but you say you’re going to try and sleep it off and see how it goes. The challenge with healthcare and the takeaway world is, with Just Eat specifically, somebody is really, really hungry, but the worst thing that could happen was the food got cancelled or the restaurant couldn’t deliver. Then they’d go through the process again. More times than not, we found that when we got that experience, consumers wouldn’t repeat. Especially on a big day, like a match day, football day, rugby games. I think the interesting one was Ramadan, actually. You would have people fasting the whole day and order their food for when they break fast. I remember the pressure on making sure that was correct. I think the time and the time to execution is what the major difference is.

When I think of it, conceptually, and somebody doesn’t get their food time, they’re hungry and it creates a lot of emotion. There is a plan B. In Treatwell, if somebody didn’t get their manicure or their pedicure, it’s a massive inconvenience, but life goes one. But in healthcare, if someone doesn’t get the care that they need, at the time they need it, you’re talking about potential death or long-term injury. So from a pressure perspective, I think from the three areas, the restaurant world, small window, get it right. But if we got it wrong, terrible consumer experience but the individual will find a plan B of some sort. Beauty, generally okay; it’s more of a luxury than a necessity, although a lot of people will say it’s a necessity. But in healthcare, there’s a lot of personal pressure on myself and the team to say, unless we give that full consumer experience, we’re talking life and death. That takes it to a completely different level.

How do you deal with that?

Making sure that we are on top of everything. The way we do it is, we put our shifts on, we put the appointment slots on. Behind that, we have a medical team, inhouse. I have a bunch of doctors, pharmacists, nurses, inhouse. Every single order, today, gets reviewed. We are regulated by the CQC. We are the highest rated digital provider, by the CQC which, ultimately, says that we are very, very safe. Behind that and what makes us very safe is, we follow NHS guidelines, which go from NICE guidelines and/or others. We make sure that, not only is the medical team robust in all that training but, actually, the whole company will go through Blue Stream Academy training. Everybody knows how we have to handle care, essentially. That’s the first thing that we do.

All our doctors are NHS registered doctors. We make sure that every single doctor on the platform also works with the NHS. If they do a couple of days with us, they’re also working with their surgery. When it comes to the live environment and somebody makes an order, during that consultation, we audit all consultations. We audit all medication and, actually, we have some automated triggers. For example, if someone comes in and they complain about a headache and we put you on a path that isn’t the norm and we give you some drugs that are for a foot infection, straightaway, on the system, it triggers. The triggers go to our operations team and to our medical team. It also goes into the internal Slack channel, as well. Everybody will be informed that, hey, hold on, this has not followed the normal care journey and we’ve got to make sure that we are on it, in real time.