Mement
An agent runs our clinics.
People meet patients and take responsibility.
Nothing else is a person's job.
We own three clinics in Hong Kong — Tsim Sha Tsui, Causeway Bay, Mong Kok. Since late July the agent has run the front of the business. It answers customers in ten languages, quotes every price, knows which branch has which machine, sends an SMS code and verifies it, books, changes and cancels. It watches all three clinics through the day and tells the staff when someone has been waiting too long, or when no therapist is free and one has to come back from break. Before morning it reconciles the card terminals against the ledger.
On 20 August someone wrote to us in Cantonese, was answered, verified and booked, with no person involved. She came in the following day, had the treatment, and paid at the clinic.
What it does not do
It does not decide whether a treatment suits you. It does not say how often you should come, or whether it will hurt. Every one of those goes to the doctor or the therapist. About twenty times a day it stops and says it does not know.
It isn't in our catalogue, so I won't guess.
Whether it suits you personally is not something I can decide. The doctor will look.
Whatever you prefer. I won't push.
The last one is not new. Shinebeam's promise in Korea, written years earlier, is that we do not perform excessive procedures.
Why we do it this way
A doctor's day is mostly not medicine. It is forms, orders, records, checking, billing. That work was priced as medicine, which is a large part of why medicine costs what it does. It is also why one doctor can only look after so many people.
Move that work and what is left is the part only a person can do — being there, deciding, and carrying the responsibility — and it can be done for more people, earlier. The oath a physician takes is to help everyone who comes. It has never been possible to keep. This is the part of it we can do something about.
Where we came from
Korean aesthetic medicine. Fifteen years, two brands — MUSE Clinic and Shinebeam — in Korea, Hong Kong and Vietnam. It is the industry the rest of the world copies; last week a customer in Hong Kong wrote to us in English asking for Korean botox.
Hong Kong is where we own and operate the clinics ourselves. That is why every number below is from Hong Kong and not from Korea. Every price is published on that site and it is what you pay.
Across the group the counter on the Hong Kong site currently reads 351,793 treatments performed.
The person who started this is a physician and still runs the clinics.
Numbers
- Web chat, first two weeks
- 2,213 exchanges · 49 appointments booked · 19 of those customers had never been to us before
- Cancellations and no-shows on those bookings
- 43%
- Online-originated revenue‡
- June 31.5% · July 32.0% · August 38.6%
- Online payments taken, net of refunds
- June HK$1,560 · July HK$180,370 · August, through the 19th, HK$259,940
- What the agent costs to run
- About US$220 a month
‡ Revenue attributable to bookings that began on the web, monthly. Counted by where the booking started, not by how it was paid.
These are small numbers. The 43% is real and we are working on it. In May every line above was zero.