Generative AI at the intersection of retail, healthcare, and technology with Curology

Listen to the Curology story or read the edited story below

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Tell us about yourself and what you do at Curology.

I’m Sarah Merlin, the Director of User Experience here at Curology, a personalized prescription skincare company. We’re at the sweet spot between telehealth, consumer goods, and technology. We serve anything you can treat via telehealth, like dermatology or acne, all the way through to anti-aging.

I head up both our content and product design teams, and I also manage our websites. My team touches everything from the second someone visits our website to our patient care experiences to our provider software. We work with consumers throughout every step of their customer journey.

I’m Kali Swenson and I sit on Sarah’s team as the Lead Content Designer at Curology.

What led you to pursue generative AI?

Our UX team of designers and user experience researchers take on a lot of work. We wanted to be able to keep up with the pace of our business needs, and never wanted to be the bottleneck preventing projects from moving along, but we also didn’t want the quality of content to suffer, so I started looking for a generative AI solution to enable people to do content design.

Why did you choose Writer?

We are a telehealth company, with a focus on patient care. When we were evaluating options, Writer stood out due to its privacy and compliance features. It made us feel secure from a brand perspective, as well as a health and patient perspective, that the data we input wouldn’t be used anywhere else.

The HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliance is what sold our internal IT, security, and legal teams on Writer. We want our instance of generative AI to be entirely in our control and not used for any other purposes.

Whenever we create content, it goes through a legal and medical review. Having a solution like Writer — where we can put in specific terms to use or not, or legal disclaimers as snippets — made us feel confident that the content we’re generating follows our legal and medical guidelines. We are now more compliant from the get-go because Writer catches things that our lawyers or providers would normally catch when reviewing content.

It was really important to me that whatever AI solution we used focused on the quality of the content. Writer made it easy to bring our style guide to life wherever we worked to make sure people were aligned across the board as opposed to these static documents we used to have that people wouldn’t be able to find.

That was another key differentiator with Writer — it meets us where everyone works, like Figma and Google Chrome, as opposed to being another tool that we have to train and onboard our teams to use. You simply install a plugin and then you see the magic of Writer everywhere.

How does Writer help Curology support multiple brands?

At Curology, we have two different skincare brands: Curology and Agency. There is a lot of overlap, but they have different audiences. Curology is 10 years old and Agency is only three, and it’s been helpful having a solution like Writer to maintain separate style guides, terms, and voices between brands and have that documented where people are working.

The way we use the voices for both Curology and Agency also differs on social media and our website. For Curology, I worked with our social media manager to set up a voice calibration for their team because the voice on the website focuses more on medical content compared to our social voice. We want to ensure consistency in these different voices to build trust with our audience, so the voice feature with Writer has been helpful in determining different voices for different places in the Curology universe throughout the customer journey.

For both of our brands, we have a lot of specific medical skincare terms. If you think about picking up your moisturizer and reading all the ingredients on the back, those are the terms we have to use regularly. Product names are always capitalized in a certain way, and the prescription ones need a little “Rx” superscript on them. The product and brand names and ingredient terms are complicated and can end up spelled in lots of different ways all over the site, so it’s great to have an auto-enforcer for terms like “spironolactone” or “minoxidil” that can be easy to miss.

How has your use of Writer evolved?

Our lifecycle team was the first to adopt Writer, and originally we used it to generate emails for us. When we were selecting Writer, we tested this use case and compared the Writer-generated email to one we wrote internally, and Writer outperformed what we would have written ourselves.

We rely on Writer to help create a lot of pages for our website. Instead of starting from scratch on copy for our homepage or landing pages, we use Ask Writer as an ideation partner. We’ll also upload our key copy docs — our internal documentation for our products — and then generate off that for emails, website work, social posts, or really any type of copy.

Since we onboarded, usage of Writer has expanded quickly across the board. Our legal, medical, customer care, and marketing teams — especially our social team — all now use Writer.

We also use Writer for managing internal documents. I’ve had various style guides that were in a brain-dump format for a while because it was primarily me looking at them. I’d field requests all day long from people with style guide questions. But since I’ve had Writer, I’ve been able to clean up the style guide document with Ask Writer and share it with other folks. I can trust that those smaller errors I would’ve had to edit will be taken care of. People feel more confident and comfortable creating their own content with the help of Writer. Writer keeps us moving along so that we can focus on bigger-picture, more strategic projects.

It’s been fun to see which folks end up being power users. We had the use cases in mind, but then ‌various folks from different teams signed up to use Writer and we can see who and how they use it, and it’s been surprising.

For example, our legal team uses Writer to maintain a guideline of what we’re legally allowed to say, but that document itself is 20-30 pages long. They create a lot of large documents to share internally, so being able to scan those documents and catch any errors and make sure they’re understandable and accessible for our teams is huge.

We submit all of our designs in Figma to our medical and legal teams for review to make sure we’re being consistent and on-brand with all of our different products. We’re enabling them with Writer to focus more holistically on if the content we are creating complies with our medical and legal needs. The feedback we’ve already started to get is more strategic and less nitpicky, which is helpful to scale everyone and save time across the board.

What was your rollout and adoption strategy?

We took a holistic approach because Kali and I really saw the value in Writer and wanted to make sure we maximized the opportunities across our organization. We met with different people, one being Jonathon Colman from HubSpot, to hear their opinions on what was successful and what was not. We took a lot of those learnings and added them to our own implementation.

The first thing that was recommended was to get Writer into our job descriptions. I happened to be updating our job descriptions at this time, so it was easy to add Writer. This made it so everyone within our UX team would be held accountable for adopting and using Writer.

We really worked hard from the beginning to make sure that everyone had an account with Writer, everyone knew how to use the different plugins and had additional specific, small-group trainings with our customer support manager. We had trainings for our UX, legal, marketing, and medical teams. We also did more nuanced use case trainings, like one for SEO. The Writer customer success team is ‌best-in-class in terms of being proactive in training and trying to figure out what the nuances around our use cases are. It’s been a wonderful, seamless partnership.

We also have a Writer help Slack channel that Kali manages. Anytime there are new updates or new ways to do things, we share in that channel. This helps us keep Writer top of mind for everyone. We also look at least once at the start of each month at our top users, what they’re doing, and why. That’s how we’ve uncovered a lot of new use cases.

What outcomes have you seen with generative AI?

My number one goal was for us to be scalable. We’ve achieved that across the board by being able to focus on more strategic work and less on the day-to-day tasks. We’re working smarter, not harder.

Writer is an invaluable tool in our toolkit. For each person using Writer, it feels like a 50% increase in productivity.

I’m able to focus on the bigger picture and work on our future vision. Having Writer frees up a lot of brain space. I really appreciate how other people I work with feel empowered to start generating content. For example, an engineer could come up with some sample copy that I can just check. Before, they’d need to explain the scenario and gist of the copy, I’d write it, and then verify with them that it made sense. Now it’s easier for everyone — we all can be more autonomous.

Additionally, because other people are now creating their own content, it bolsters the organizational sentiment that content matters and that it should be a certain way. People see what goes into the process of creating content. With Writer, I’m able to interact with people in a problem-solving way rather than be the content police.

What advice do you have for other AI leaders?

It’s important to emphasize that generative AI is a tool and not a magic wand. It’s another tool to use in our day-to-day processes. It’s not an immediate magic problem solver, but there are so many different problems it can solve. It enables a lot of different people to do a lot more work more productively.

AI has completely changed the way I work for the better. Writer is a great thought partner and makes me rethink my workflows. Generative AI like Writer is one of the many tools you can use to be more productive and get yourself out of the granularity and into the bigger picture.

What’s next for your team?

I’m focused on developing our content design system. I want to establish Writer as a part of our content design system, and make sure that we’re using Writer in the right ways for the right people.

We want to continue working with the voice feature for our brands, Agency and Curology. There are also a lot of quick and easy wins with marketing and social media that we want to focus on, and in general, I want our team to get better at prompt crafting. We always want to think about how we can scale strategically.