User-generated content in healthcare
At Tata 1mg, we believe in providing the best experience to the customer for making an informed buying decision. And when it comes to an informed buying decision, authentic content plays an important role.
Content can either be written by experts or the users themselves. But both have their own set of advantages. Expert-written content is usually perceived as well-researched and unbiased. But on the other hand, user-generated content is generally perceived as more genuine and trustworthy, especially in the healthcare industry.
User-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content or UGC can be in any form, ranging from a simple rating or review to Q&As, forums, communities, social media testimonials or video content. The only mandate is that it needs to be generated by end consumers themselves. User-generated content serves multiple purposes, precisely engagement, trust and awareness.
When we thought of building or revamping our UGC system, we thought of the existing problems first and they were:
- Lack of ratings and reviews hence reduced trust leading to a competitive disadvantage
- A non-scalable, non-robust, non-flexible and outdated system which couldn’t take a load of even a few lakhs of review notifications a day
- Not able to contribute much to users’ buying experience
Building UGC in any e-commerce would involve taking care of these things:
- Quality control/ Moderation
Needless to say, when the user writes content, it needs to be moderated for removing any profanity or irrelevant content that might hamper/mislead other users in a negative way. Hence we introduced a review moderation system driven by Data science where the machine learning algorithm removes profanity, irrelevant content and competitor names.
Further, the non-rejected content moves to the next step of manual moderation where it is further moderated by our manual moderation experts. In case of a discrepancy between data science and manual moderation, the feedback is sent back to the machine learning algorithm to improve its accuracy. The target is to remove manual moderation altogether at some point in time.
2. Scalability and reusability
A tech solution is never optimized unless it is future-proof. Scalability plays an important role in making a system future-proof. We built the system in such a way that it could tackle all the current and future user-generated content use cases across the organization. The system was scalable to send more than 50 lakhs rating collection notifications/events a day which can increase with time.
Mongo DB was used to store data up to a few crore rows, again which is scalable to be extended further.
The same DB, architecture, logic and code base can practically be reused to write any UGC use case in the company. Multiple services were built in a way which reduced a single point of failure and can be upscaled/downscaled on a need basis. Also, they can be released independently. Monitoring and alerting were other key components of this system.
3. Configurability and flexibility:
Everything was made configurable:
- Questions in the survey
- Number, timeline and frequency of notifications/nudges to collect content
- Conditions related to content collection
4. Engaging review form
Last, but not least, it is important to make the content collection form engaging enough for the user to not drop off in the journey. A user is assumed to be lazy, especially when you make a user put effort into something without immediate gratification or direct gain. Hence, the content collection journey should be as seamless as possible with minimum effort required from the user’s end. We have revamped our review collection page keeping this in mind and are constantly striving to optimize it.
A few things we did to achieve the above:
- Started submitting the rating as soon as the user taps on a star rating without a need to submit the entire form
- Asking questions which needed minimum thinking and just a few clicks, and
- Showing other products for review on the thank you page for the maximum collection rate
Again going back to scalability, we also built our review collection form in web-view hence reducing our current and future development efforts on android and iOS platforms.
Also, we introduced review collection nudges at various touchpoints in the user journey as means to serve as a constant reminder and evoke FOMO. This point, while could receive a lot of counter-arguments but in my opinion, is important to maintain a balance of business objectives and user experience.
Final thoughts:
When building any new system, understanding the business use case, and users’ pain points, and making it future-proof is very important. It’s important for product and tech to collaborate and think about a scalable system which can reduce future development efforts and can tackle multiple use cases. Spending a little more time now is always better than putting in repeated efforts with no increment gain.