The Role of Contextual Information in Customer Reviews: A Field Experiment on a Mental Health Platform

Abstract

Online mental health platforms can increase the accessibility of mental health care by allowing customers to select a therapist from a large pool of vetted professionals. However, customers may find it difficult to choose a therapist best suited to their needs because therapists typically list multiple specializations that tend to overlap significantly. This makes it challenging for online mental health platforms to attract new customers and retain existing ones. Motivated by this challenge, we conducted a randomized field experiment in partnership with Singapore's largest online mental health platform. In this experiment, we empirically investigate whether a simple intervention on the customer reviews—revealing contextual information about the review writers—can improve the platform's ability to attract and retain customers. We find that, relative to the control, treated customers were 42% more likely to book at least one therapy session, and they booked 87% more sessions in total during the experiment. We also find that customers in the treatment group spent more time searching on the platform, which explains the improvement in the platform's ability to attract and retain customers. Furthermore, treated customers who have the first therapy session booked 36% more sessions with their first chosen therapist and were twice as likely to write a positive review. Overall, our results suggest that revealing contextual information about the review writers improves the informativeness of customer reviews on mental health platforms, and it is a simple and effective way to increase successful matches and foster long-term relationships between customers and the platform.

Keywords: Mental Health, Online Platforms, Customer Reviews, Customer Conversion, Matching Quality