Walgreens partners with Microsoft, Adobe on new healthcare platform
A leading drugstore retailer is teaming up with two tech heavyweights to deliver personalized healthcare and shopping offerings.
Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) is expanding an existing strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe to launch a digital experience and customer insights platform. The cloud-based platform will provide Walgreens and Boots customers with omnichannel access to products and services from the company’s global pharmacy and retail businesses.
Establishing this platform will advance WBA into the second phase of its three-year, $1 billion digital transformation plan, which the retailer has publicly identified as one of its key strategic priorities.
WBA intends to leverage the new healthcare platform to harness insights to deliver more engaging and personalized experiences, while protecting customer privacy. As a result, the retailer hopes to help increase access to key services within pharmacy and beauty, among other categories, while driving convenience and providing more options to address daily needs.
For example, Walgreens will use the new platform to launch an individually tailored prescription experience for patients at Walgreens, while Boots will launch an in-house-developed beauty experience for customers that enables its beauty consultants to provide custom product recommendations. WBA also expects the new platform to dramatically enhance its marketing effectiveness and drive mass personalization by delivering the right offers and content to the right customer, in the right context, at the right time and through the right channels.
The Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer insights platform will serve as WBA’s customer data platform to provide a unified, 360-degree view of the customer and unlock insights that support personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s customer experience management technology will serve as an end-to-end solution for functions including analytics, content management, personalization, and campaign orchestration.
“At WBA, our mission is to deliver extraordinary experiences that enrich our customers’ lives,” said Vineet Mehra, global chief marketing officer, Walgreens Boots Alliance. “Capabilities to combine previously disparate customer data sets, including information from more than 100 million members of our loyalty programs, into a more singular, unified view of the customer – powered by these modern technology platforms – will enable us to truly personalize our omnichannel healthcare and retail offering,”
Walgreens Boots Alliance operates more than 18,750 stores and has a presence in more than 25 countries.