Archives for February 2021

Hey everybody, guess what? We have a toll-free number!

It’s actually +1-888-254-6267 and if you can’t remember that, just dial 888-CLINCOSM (the “M” is silent, so you actually don’t have to dial that).

If you forget, just go to the website and it’ll be at the top, right next to our support email.

The placement may shift down the road, but it’ll remain at the top.

Big deal, Oliver – plenty of companies have a toll-free number – why’s this worth a blog post?

Late last year, the founder/CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, passed way. I picked up a copy of his book, Delivering Happiness and realized that I buy into a lot of what he has to say about company culture and customer-centricity, but don’t have a consistent track-record on implementing the customer-focus. One of his secret weapons was plastering his toll-free phone number on every single page of Zappos.com. If at anytime a user/customer gets frustrated, they can pick up the phone and talk to someone.

Despite being such an easy way to engage with customers and improve your service, so few companies actually implement it. Those who have a helpline fall short:

Just this week, at the GameStop testimony, Congressman Casten dials the Robinhood helpline and goes straight to voicemail.

We’re still small, but we’re going to shoot for 12-hours between 6AM to 6PM Pacific Time on weekdays (our website traffic shows that barely anyone care about clinical trials on the weekends).

So if you’re using the website and you’ve got questions, give us a ring (or text)!

A couple months back, my wife – a physician – was reading a press release from Anixa Biosciences on prophylactic breast cancer vaccine:

And there’s mention of a clinical trial; so she went to search ClinicalTrials.gov:

The same search on Clincosm yields:

The reason you can’t find it on ClinicalTrials.gov is because their search is only looking at some fields… not all of the fields. And so when you input keywords, they’re only checking if some fields have your keywords.

This type of search was very common before Google came on the scene. You had to input the right keywords into the right fields and if you got it right, you’d happily get on with it.

Full-text search engines – as is in the name – searches all of the text. Google was the first to do this at scale and being able to find stuff on Google was magical back in the early 2000’s.

That’s not fair, you say. There’s Advanced Search where you can explicitly specify which fields to search on.

No cigar. You can’t find this study under Anixa Biosciences because Anixa is not listed as the sponsor. Dr. George T. Budd – the Clinical Investigator conducting the trial – is listed as the sponsor.

This is 2021. There’s no reason to be held back by the tool that is incapable of full-text search.