Alzheimer Society of Ireland Tea Week

The week of April 30th to May 4th is the Alzheimer Society of Ireland’s Tea Week and our friends at the Fresh Breath Clinic in Churchtown have been in touch to say that they are inviting people to call into their practice between 10am and 4pm all week for tea, coffee and goodies.

If you can spare some money for this good cause you can donate to the society here. You can also find out more about the services the society helps to provide.

WhatClinic.com Customer Service Award Winners 2011

Every day at WhatClinic.com we pass on thousands of enquiries from consumers at various stages of their decision making processes. Whatever stage they are at they all have one thing in common. They want to know that the person at the other end of the phone or replying to their email cares about them and their needs.

Clinic staff can demonstrate this in any number of ways:

• By answering phone calls politely
• By replying to emails quickly
• By answering personally, not just with automated answers
• By helping to put any fears to rest

How clinic staff handle that first enquiry can make the difference between a patient booking and a lost opportunity. It is the first real deal breaker in a consumer / clinic relationship, so in order to maintain high standards it is essential for clinics to know how consumers feel. This is why we poll consumers and publish their customer service feedback on our site, so both parties can find out how they’re thought of.

Every year we analyse the data we have about consumers’ customer service experiences and identify the clinics that are consistently rated the best and reward them with our annual customer service award. It provides consumers with a strong indication that a clinic will handle their enquiry quickly, professionally and politely.

With less than 1% of clinics receiving the award it is a real mark of excellence, so it is no wonder that clinic staff love to display the award both in their clinics and online. Above you can see some of our most recent proud recipients from Armley Dental Practice, Stetic Implant & Dental Centers, Bangkok International Dental Center, and Secret Surgery Ltd.

Failing to provide customer service to a high enough standard is like falling at the first hurdle in a race. All other effort and preparation goes to waste as a result. So the question today for clinic owners is how would you rate your own staff in the customer service stakes? What one thing could you do today to make it more likely that a consumer receives a quick, professional and polite answer to their enquiry?

First of all let me me say a big thanks to everyone who came along to our office launch event last night. I hope you all enjoyed yourselves and the wise words offered by Caelen and by our guest Stephen Donnelly, independent TD for Wicklow and East Carlow.

Today we’re delighted to be able to announce 10 new jobs here in Dublin with hiring starting immediately. Full details are in the press release below:

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Health Search Engine WhatClinic.com Announce 10 New Jobs In Dublin
Plans announced to open operations in the UK and Brazil within 12 months

13 October 2011, Dublin – WhatClinic.com have today announced 10 new jobs in their Dublin office. Hiring for positions in sales, marketing and software engineering will start immediately. The health search engine helps private patients research and contact clinics for elective treatments, a market which is worth €6 billion annually in the UK and Ireland alone. WhatClinic.com are the dominant player in this sector and have brought web review, reservation and information services to an industry that is just beginning to harness the web to drive business.

In addition to the jobs announced for Dublin the profitable startup plans to open an office in Brazil in 2012 to help it expand into the even larger South American market. A UK sales office will also be opened in the next 6 months.

Founded in Dublin four years ago, WhatClinic.com currently employs 15 people and is looking to strengthen its existing operations and accelerate its growth with the newly announced positions. The company is backed by Enterprise Ireland and a number of private investors including well known technology entrepreneur Ray Nolan.

“We’re delighted to be able to announce these new jobs today which will help WhatClinic.com continue its rapid growth” said Philip Boyle, Marketing Manager at the company. “The new staff can look forward to helping us give millions of patients easy access to better information about their treatment options.”

About WhatClinic.com

WhatClinic.com is a health care search engine that helps private patients get the treatment they want at a clinic that suits their needs. With easy access to prices, patient reviews and qualifications along with addresses, phone numbers and email facilities, patients can make better informed decisions by comparing all of their treatment options. Serving more than eight million visitors annually from the UK, Ireland, and further afield WhatClinic.com helps patients find clinics in the fields of dentistry, plastic surgery, fertility, laser eye surgery, cosmetic beauty, and many more.

For more information please contact:

Philip Boyle at WhatClinic.com
Tel: +353 (0) 1 525 3597
Email: pboyle@whatclinic.com

On Wednesday the 12th of October we’re officially opening our new offices on Duke Lane Upper right in the heart of Dublin and we’d love it if you could join us between 5pm and 7pm for some light refreshments, which, along with the usual wine and beer, will probably include cheese from Caelen’s new favourite shop Sheridan’s Cheesemongers.

After 7pm the further pint shaped refreshments will be served in Kehoe’s of South Anne Street, conveniently located right across the road from our front door.

If you need any further directions just get in touch. If you are coming along drop us a line by email or by phone, or on Twitter, or in the comments below.

WhatClinic.com
12 Duke Lane Upper
Dublin 2

Tel: 01 6520520
Email: pboyle@whatclinic.com / cking@whatclinic.com
Twitter: @phil_whatclinic / @whatclinic

P.S. Apologies for the static Google map above – Google Maps and Google Places seem to be a little confused about where we are. Please don’t turn up to Westland Row by mistake!

Most of you reading will probably be familiar with the phrase “price discrimination“. It refers to the practice of charging different amounts to different people for the same product or service. Effectively, you are charged based on your ability to pay, not on what you receive in return.

We came across an interesting example of price discrimination recently when talking to some solicitors. They listed a set of criteria which they use as the basis of calculating what they charge their clients. These included:

• The value of the item / deal / property involved
• How important the matter is to the client
• The rarity of the questions raised

So, for instance, two people getting exactly the same advice about a property deal can be charged different amounts depending on the value of each of the deals, and a company can be charged more depending on “how important” a matter is to it, or how often the question comes up!

Is it any wonder the legal profession is under scrutiny for its pricing practices?

This week we moved into our new offices on Duke Lane Upper right in the heart of Dublin city centre. Above you can see a few pictures of the sales and engineering teams, our temporary meeting table, and our very blue sofa in the kitchen / lounge area.

For anyone who wants to get in touch with us our new address is:

WhatClinic.com
12 Duke Lane Upper
Dublin 2
Ireland

Our phone number stays the same: +353 1 6520520

We’ll be hosting a little office warming event soon which we’d love you to join us at, so keep an eye out for details here and on our Twitter accounts: Caelen / Phil

Do you have too much to read?

Recently I was forced to reset my Google Reader account thanks to Google’s recent account clean up. The upside of this was that I had to resubscribe to any RSS feed I still wanted to read regularly. A few essentials were added first: Google’s Webmaster Central, SEOMoz, Distilled and so on. Then a few other favourites like Fred Wilson’s AVC blog and Mark Suster’s Both Sides Of The Table were added.

What really struck me though was the number of subscriptions I didn’t want to keep up with any more. This was largely for three reasons:

1. I was no longer that interested in the topic
2. The content was too repetitive
3. The content volume and quality had spiralled out of control

For the first reason there was nothing the publisher could have done to keep me as a subscriber. For the second reason, it was possible but unlikely. Some of the topics were quite niche and there wasn’t a lot new to say on a regular basis. However the third reason is completely within every publisher’s control.

Straying From The Original Plot

I’ll pick out Mashable as an example. It’s quite a regular occurrence that when I open my reader in the morning there are 30 or 40 stories in the Mashable folder. Buried in there somewhere are the one or two that I might still find interesting, but there is no way I’m going wade through the rest to find them, especially considering that another more focused blog is bound to reblog it, or someone in my Twitter stream will tweet about it.

Mashable, along with a growing number of other web properties, seem to be obsessed with growing visitor numbers at the expense of focus and even quality control, and in doing so they publish so often and on so many topics that I’m no longer interested in what Mashable has to offer. The same can be said for a growing number of blogs that are looking to grow visitors numbers by growing the number of articles they publish per day.

A Pivot From Niche To Mainstream

Mashable is supposed to be about Social Media News and Web Tips according to it’s own homepage <title> tag. So why is it publishing a story today about the new HTC Sensation XE with Beats Audio? And what about its article on Expanding Your Startup To International Markets? Or even the new version of VMware Fusion? Quite simply they know that these articles will gather traffic because they know they can rank easily. But should they publish them in the first place?

I guess the question comes down to this. Do Mashable just want as much traffic as they can get their hands on, or do they want to be the go to source for social media news? Do they want to be mainstream or niche? The answer in this particular case seems pretty clear to me. Maybe they will succeed in becoming the next Wired, and if that’s what they want, good luck to them. But in the meantime, when I want some social media news, I’ll go to a social media specialist source.

My tip? Unless you’re trying to be come a broad news aggregator stick to what you know, and what your readers want, and make sure you have something to say. If that means publishing less often, so be it, but at least you know that the resulting relevant traffic will be because of the quality of your content and not just because of the volume of articles you publish.

Varnish makes websites fly... once you iron out a few issues.

[Here’s a bit of background about our previous cache setup. Skip ahead to “Using Varnish To Cache WhatClinic.com” if you want to jump straight into the Varnish section.]

Our main website is built on Microsoft’s IIS and we have been using its built-in page and component level caching to serve html pages for several years. This built-in caching is easy to setup and quite flexible, but it is very memory hungry.

The memory issue isn’t much of a problem on small static websites with only a couple of hundred pages. Unfortunately though, WhatClinic.com is a dynamic site with potentially millions of individual pages to serve. Typically we were getting only 12% of our pages served from the cache, and sometimes this was as low as 6%. It was almost pointless running the cache at all.

The biggest problem for us is the breadth of the website. On a typical day we have 30,000 unique visitors, but they land on 23,000 distinct URLs. Over the course of a month this balloons to 145,000 distinct landing pages.  Worse still, they look at over half a million distinct pages on the site.

To try and improve the performance of the existing IIS cache we tried writing the page cache to disk. Under test conditions with relatively small numbers of pages this worked well, but to get even 50% of our pages from one month’s visits in the cache it meant having 250,000 pages written to the disk. In the end the NT file system on our servers starting grinding to a halt, not because of request volume but purely because of the number of individual files involved.

Using Varnish To Cache WhatClinic.com

We came up with some ways around the NT file system problem but decided in the end it would be better to move the cache off the main box altogether. At the same time we decided to look at Varnish as a solution, with a view to hosting it on AWS.

On the upside Varnish is lightweight and powerful, but it also introduced a number of new problems for us to overcome:

1. Varnish Caches Cookies

We use a cookie to store all kinds of information about a new visitor, including things like their country of origin, so we can display clinics’ prices in the visitor’s local currency. To get around Varnish serving up pages based on one person’s cookie all the time we had to move our cookie drop into a javascript call rather than doing it on the page. No big deal, but something to be aware of.

2. All Requests Go Through The Varnish Box

To determine a visitor’s location we look at their IP address, but since all requests were going through the Varnish server our own server was only seeing one IP address hit it all the time. We changed the code to pass the referring IP address along and so we could pick it off.

Problem solved, except now our default access logs don’t record the proper IP address of each visitor. We use Google Analytics and our own logs for the bulk of our reporting so this isn’t a big deal, but at some point we might have to look at writing our own access logs with the referring IP address if only to give us the peace of mind that when something does go wrong we can track it in the raw log data.

3. Altering Our Landing Pages

Depending on whether you have just landed on WhatClinic.com, or are browsing subsequent pages, we alter the layout of the page. The layout differences are quite extensive even though the data is all the same, so it isn’t efficient to make the changes on the client side. We need to cache two different versions of the same page.

The solution involved getting Varnish to pass along the referring URL and using something like (isReferringDomainWhatClinic.com) as part of the key for the cache as well as the requested URL itself. In the end this was pretty easy to do too, but it did double the number of pages in the cache. However, we were trying in particular to improve the speed of our landing pages so it is worth it to us.

4. Time To Live

As we said in the intro, we have a very broad site. Our pages also change quite infrequently, so we wanted to have the maximum possible time to live for the cached pages, in the order of several months. However, some pages do change, and a change to any one of our customer’s data may have effects that ripple over hundreds of pages that their clinic might appear on.

The solution was to set our time to live to several months, and then remove pages from the cache only when they had been updated. Having implemented a means to remove the pages from our cache, we then had to determine when a change to a clinic’s data had occurred and which pages were affected by the change, so we knew which pages to remove from the cache and update.

Working out exactly which pages were affected turned out to be a little problematic but we solved it eventually and we’re reasonably happy that we’ve covered all the cases. We also coded a big red “Remove All This Clinic’s Data From The Cache” for use in case of emergencies.

The Results

Overall, it has been a big win. After about three weeks of operation we have a page hit rate of around 65%, which is a huge improvement from the 12% we used to get. Cached pages are returned now somewhere in the order of 100-200ms instead of 2000-5000ms, and the load on our server has dropped dramatically, improving performance for those pages which are never going to be in the cache too.

Of course, having improved the efficiency of generating the page html, we are now looking at the speed of all our own JavaScript, our external calls to analytics, our social media buttons and other external client-side calls.

Performance improvements never end, do they?

Identity, or rather the ability to create new identities, is a key facet of the internet. Some people troll away on internet forums under assumed names just to cause trouble, while others use made up identities to expose political scandal or even circumvent local laws. This ability to change identity at will is both a boon to the creative and a bane to the legislative, but in its own way it drives innovation and change.

Identity And Social Media

Eric Schmidt of Google spoke recently at the Edinburgh International Television Festival to announce the launch of Google Television in Europe, which should hit our shores in the new year. However, he also took some questions, including one from Andy Carvin about Google Plus (G+). He asked “how Google justifies the policy [of making people use their real name] given that real identities could put people at risk?”

Schmidt’s answer was that G+ was built primarily an identity service, and that people were free not to use it if they felt they could be putting themselves at risk. I found the answer a little disappointing, especially given the tone of his actual speech which took issue with the ongoing split between the sciences and the arts in the UK.

By forcing G+ users to use their real identities Google are in effect silencing the weird and the creative along with the subversive and the disruptive, leaving them to create their “fake” identities on message boards and Twitter and Facebook instead. Google’s attitude appears to be driven by their desire to use G+ data as part of their search results algorithm as a way of reducing web spam, but this seems like a short sighted method of guaranteeing the authenticity of a +1 click for instance.

Authentication vs Identity

Rather than focus purely on identity I think Facebook and Twitter are getting it right by focusing on authentication. By verifying that you are the person who created a certain Facebook or Twitter account you can continue that internet persona uninterrupted on a myriad of different sites. You could potentially Like things more than once, or share them on multiple Twitter accounts, but does that really cause a problem when a real person does it once or twice?

Say you could have more than one G+ account then, how many people would go to go to the trouble of creating two accounts to game Google’s search results? A lot unfortunately. There’s real money riding on it after all, and knowing the experience of Black Hat SEO practitioners and their “creative” ways of building links, they’ve probably already gotten around Google’s current protections anyway.

Google really are going to be fighting an uphill battle to keep it to one account per person. Twitter suffers a great deal from fake accounts being set up for spam purposes. Facebook apparently less so, even though Facebook Likes are now almost a web currency of their own. But companies with people as smart as the ones at Google, Facebook and Twitter should be able to decouple the ideas of multiple (valid) identities and spambots created purely to manipulate results.

Who Are You Right Now?

I think Fred Wilson’s take on Identity and Authentication is pretty spot on too. He comes at it from a slightly different angle, not so much about fake or hidden identities but rather about his real identity being split across different sites for different reasons. It was for exactly this reason that G+ made the leap forward it did with Circles, letting people split out who they talk to based on some common themes, but by tying it all to your real name it restricts itself unnecessarily.

Quinton O’Reilly also recently covered some of the problems that arise from having a publicly accessible profile with its own unique persona, especially when potential employers come looking to dig up some dirt on you. To me that’s all the more reason why people should be allowed to have different accounts, or identities if they want to. In fact, it’s almost exactly the reason that most people I know on LinkedIn are members of that site. They don’t want their Facebook profiles perused by employers, colleagues or customers!

Should Businesses Care?

Which brings me to the business end of things. Most people who use WhatClinic.com use their real names when they create an enquiry and they use real email addresses and real phone numbers. But do we know if they just created that email account, or just bought a prepaid mobile phone? No. Do we know if they’re using a pseudonym? No. Should we care? Not really. So long as the clinic can actually contact the user they’re free to call themselves whatever they want.

People change depending on the situation they’re in. They do it in the real world and they do it online, and I doubt even Google are going to be able to stop that.

Google Analytics was recently updated to change how it calculated when a visitor’s session ended. We were told this should have only a small effect, around 1% on average, on how our visitors were being counted. The change went live on Thursday August 11th. If you look at the graph above you can see on Friday the 12th our reported visits increased by over 40%. This trend continued for nearly a week.

Now a 40% increase in traffic would obviously be welcome, but our unique visitors report told a very different story. Nothing had changed much at all!

So, what was going on? It turns out there were some bugs in the Analytics update that created new sessions for users when they should have had only one. Full details are in the update to the announcement of the original change. It would seem that in our case visitors who clicked the back button in their browser to go back to the landing page they arrived on were being counted multiple times.

Google pushed a fix to this problem on Tuesday the 16th of August and everything seems to be back to normal now, but I’m sure we’re not alone in having spent some time trying to work out what was going on and what changes we’d need to make to be able to compare reports from before and after the change. Thankfully it looks like that’s not an issue anymore. Still, it seems like a pretty big bug to slip through the net for such an important product.