How, at Treatwell, we make both our consumers’ and partners’ lives work beautifully

We’ve all heard it plenty of times: “Put your customer at the heart of everything you do and you’re sure to succeed!”. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment but want to talk about some of the challenges we face when trying to live by this, and how we rise to them, through the lens of our product as a double sided marketplace. We need to be considerate of disrupting the careful equilibrium required to ensure a healthy marketplace can scale and flourish, whilst delivering long term solutions that create powerful connections.

At Treatwell, our marketplace brings salon partners online (supply) allowing consumers (demand) to browse, book and manage all of their beauty appointments online. We need plenty of good salons and services for our consumers to choose from, and we need plenty of good customers booking and attending appointments for our salons to build healthy client lists, generating that all important network effect. Naturally, we consider both salons and consumers our ‘customers’, so how do we make sure we’re keeping customers at the heart of everything we do and actively acknowledge our responsibility to ensure that when benefiting one group we aren’t hindering the other?

For me, it comes down to a handful of things:

1. Avoiding declarations that supply or demand is more important than the other
2. Establish a product process that generates empathy and a deep understanding of both sides of the coin
3. Offset ‘negative’ customer impacts with a considered CX
4. Debate, share and talk openly internally to build empathy

Avoid declarations that supply or demand is more important than the other

The reality is that we can’t heavily favour one side over the other. Both consumers and our salon partners need to succeed in their interaction with our products if we’re going to sustain a healthy marketplace, so for me this topic of ‘which is more important’ is slightly redundant and an unhelpful way to tackle or solve the challenges we’re often presented with.

Instead we need to focus our energy on how we can solve customer problems with considered and powerful solutions that benefit both parties where possible, and offset negative effects where it isn’t. A good example here could be one of our USPs: last minute and off peak discounts. We know our consumers love and search for a discount and it’s a great incentive for them to use Treatwell. However we can’t simply expect our salons to discount without anything of value in return. So to ensure we’re delivering value to our salon partners we focus on using discounts to specifically fill last minute and off peak slots that would have otherwise likely gone empty — both sides benefit.

Establish a product process that generates empathy and builds a deep understanding of the problem we’re trying to solve

Our product processes, from inception to delivery, are all focused on solving customer problems in the most impactful way possible. A few ways we aim to do this are:

• Focus on delivering the Minimum Loveable Product instead of just the minimum viable. A user would probably have happily waited the extra 3 weeks if it meant they were getting a product they can actually use! We try to avoid bowing to the pressure of delivering as fast as humanly possible if the trade off is not being proud of what we’ve put out there or a problem remains unsolved.
• Build empathy into solutions and consider the many impacts that your solution could have across an undoubtedly complex ecosystem, then seek to offset any unavoidable impacts. This requires a deep customer understanding coupled with a wide domain knowledge to operate confidently that we won’t be disrupting the equilibrium.
• Rely on tried and tested tools and frameworks to get ourselves in the customer’s shoes. Customer journey maps are a personal favourite as they bring together a wide range of brains to offer a variety of viewpoints to cover the full customer spectrum and often lead to some true ‘aha!’ moments. The most valuable insights often come from a chat to a salon partner or a loyal Treatwell customer — never undervalue the power of good user testing!
• Create ‘Principles’ for a new experience, change or feature that seek to state what will be achieved and improved for all our customer groups (salons, consumers, internal), regardless of if the change is going to be delivered predominately on the supply or demand side of the business.
• Allow ourselves to admit when we got it wrong. Perhaps we simply underestimated the impact our feature would have on the ‘other’ side of the business. Solve the problem at hand and learn from it for next time.

Offset ‘negative’ customer impacts with a considered CX

Being committed to putting the customer first doesn’t mean that we’ll never be willing to make a tough decision, but it does mean that we’re committed to making the experience we create as a result the best possible CX that it can be.

It’s key to aim to remove as much friction as possible in return for asking the customer to do something they may not instinctively benefit from or want to do. This may mean some more creative thinking is required or that the blast radius of our choice may be wider than we initially thought. By keeping our customers at the heart of what we do, we can move deliberately in the right direction.

Debate, share and talk openly and be open to failure

We have our natural “alliances” internally within the business, some of us work more on the consumer side day to day and others on the salon partner side. It’s key for us to break down any walls and silos that could potentially build up if left unchecked, and strive to operate as a truly cross functional organisation and tap into the wealth of knowledge that exists throughout Treatwell.

If we feel we’re ever operating in favour of one customer over the other, we’re committed to debating and talking openly about it as well as being crystal clear on our decision making and thought process to make sure it’s with the right intentions. This helps us come to a solution that we can be comfortable with and hopefully generate internal support and also build empathy internally for the sometimes. difficult decisions we’ve had to make.

Our dream projects and ideal solutions are those that are solving a problem for both sides of the markets, a true all round winner!

Of course, it’s inevitable that sometimes we get it wrong. Our well intended changes just don’t have the impact that we’d hope or worse case they have a negative impact somewhere within our ecosystem. Keeping a close eye on feedback & performance means we can rectify any mistakes, learn from them in order to do better next time and continue to maintain the delicate balance.

Ultimately, we all have the same goal at heart: Make our consumers and partners lives work beautifully.