In a bid to improve its Search Plus suite of services, Directory services company Justdial has completed developing two new vendor applications targeted at doctors and restaurants respectively, the company founder VSS Mani said during the company’s Q2-FY15 earnings conference call.
He said that they are currently informing the doctors and restaurants about this product and have also setup a call center that helps them to get started. The products will initially be available for free and for an yet undisclosed free later.
Doctor-focused solution
Mani mentions that the doctor’s vendor application will allow doctors to schedule appointments with their patients as well as save patient records on the cloud. This will include basic information, patient symptoms, prescribed medications and family medical history among others. Note that JustDial had rolled doctor appointments on its site last year as part of its transition to a services-focused transaction platform.
Mani notes that these vendor applications are integrated with Justdial’s regular consumer app, enabling patients to access their prescriptions within the app. “The app itself will prompt him that he has to buy medicines and it will suggest him nearby medical stores where he can place orders. If the doctor has suggested some diagnostic requirement, it will also tell him suggest him the diagnostic centers near him where he could do the diagnosis and by doing so he will also get an instantaneous alert as he goes to one of these diagnostic clinics and whenever the report is ready it will alert the app user”.
This is quite similar to what Delhi-based online doctor appointment service HelpingDoc and doctor directory & clinic management system Lybrate offers. Note that Lybrate had launched two Android apps called Practice Management and Find Best Doctors earlier this year. Practice management allowed doctors to add new patients, track payments, create appointments, and record patient treatments among other things while Find Best Doctors, as the name suggests, allows patients to search for nearby doctors based on ratings and book an appointment.
However what probably gives JustDial an advantage over these players is the number of doctors who are already listed on the platform. JustDial claims to currently have 340,000 doctors listed on its site.
Restaurant-focused solution
Mani said the restaurant vendor application will enable restaurants to better manage table reservations, customer orders and home delivery orders. More importantly, it will provide JustDial access to accurate available inventory for a restaurant.
Other players offering table booking services include TimesCity which had acquired restaurant booking service DineOut in April this year. TimesCity had also inked a partnership with Mobikon to offer restaurant bookings last year. New Delhi-based TableGrabber, that launched in July 2012, had recently introduced pricing and reservation strategy platform for restaurants called RezGuru.
Plans for a similar offering in retail segment
Mani mentions that they are also developing a similar product for people who sell branded and nonbranded goods, enabling them to manage their inventory, billing and publishing their inventory in any third party site including JustDial.
He added this solution will be available for all businesses listed on JustDial and similar to the doctor & restaurant vendor apps, it will be initially available for free and for an yet undisclosed fee later.
