Mickey Alam Khan, Mobile Marketer
August 13, 2010

SMS text alerts are a big hit for Walgreens Co., a $63 billion drugstore chain which puts its 7,500 stores nationwide at the center of all marketing and commerce.

Walgreens has seen tremendous growth in registrations for its prescription SMS alerts in the eight months since the Chicago company began the program. In fact, SMS sign-up is outpacing email, according to a senior executive.

“Both are growing, but text alerts are hockey-sticking — we weren’t expecting that,” said Abhi Dhar, chief technology officer for ecommerce at Walgreens.

Mr. Dhar was addressing attendees yesterday on the final day of the eTail East show that focused on mobile commerce and social media. (Please see the follow-up video at the conclusion of this story.)

Text is healthy

Walgreens is putting considerable marketing muscle behind not just the SMS program but also its iPhone® application and a mobile site created by Usablenet.

For example, the company recently ran two 30-second rolling videos on a billboard in New York’s Times Square where Walgreens has a store.

The messages on the two-story-high outdoor effort focused on its pharmacy and photo businesses.

Viewers of those spots were encouraged to order prescriptions and photos from the mobile phone and pick them up in-store.

In addition to downloading an application, these consumers were also asked to text the keyword WAG to the 21525 common short code. Those consumers who texted received a coupon for redemption in a Walgreens store.

While Mr. Dhar would not disclose the size of the mobile database, he did say that the SMS registrations were growing. So was the number of Walgreens application downloads.

“The customers want it,” Mr. Dhar said. “What we realized is that we need to educate our customers [about mobile] offline.”

Walgreens uses Boca Raton, FL-based 3Cinteractive’s mobile technology to support its text program.

Early adopter

Walgreens has been an early adopter with digital and electronic technology.

The retailer has linked its pharmacies by satellite since the 1980s. In 1999 it put customer prescription history online and, six years later, offered online digital photo services.

Now, like most retailers in this market, Walgreens is bracing itself for a host of macro factors affecting the economy: a healthcare crisis, an aging population, 9.5 percent unemployment and three quarters of declining GDP.

With all these economic woes, consumers continue to adapt to new technology and evolve behavior.

For example, 70 percent of mobile phone owners take photos on their phone.

However, it is the multichannel aspect with technology at its core that works for Walgreens.

“A customer that interacts with us in more than one channel is at least three times more valuable than one who interacts in one channel,” Mr. Dhar said.

Indeed, most Walgreens Internet customers prefer to order online and pick up in store. That is the case for 97 percent of photo orders and 98 percent of prescriptions.

Multichannel approach

Research shows that consumers are interacting with retailers and marketers in a myriad of ways, including social media, tablets, game consoles, smartphones and browsers.

The trick, as Mr. Dhar pointed out, is “how do you, as a consumer, bounce from one channel to another and then another?”

For Walgreens, he sees multiple contacts for one transaction.

For example, the traditional ecommerce Walgreens.com site helps Walgreens customers browse, navigate, search and buy. The smartphone application allows for searching of information and inventory and purchase. The mobile site is used for price-based searches. And then these customers walk into the Walgreens store.

Mr. Dhar concluded his presentation with four points in summary.

First, consumers have changed and retailers have to deal with it.

Next, consumers think of choice, convenience and control. The definition is based on experiences in multiple sectors.

Third, mobile is an essential connecting capability for multichannel transactions.

“[Finally], there is no such thing as ‘ecommerce’ or ‘mcommerce,’” Mr. Dhar said. “Commerce is commerce.”

Final Take

Abhi Dhar is the chief technology officer for ecommerce for Walgreens.

South Florida Business Journal
Brian Bandell
Friday, July 9, 2010

After creating mobile communication platforms for major corporations, Boca Raton-based 3Cinteractive has targeted the health care industry as a promising market for expansion.

The company has a pilot program with Walgreens to alert customers via text message that their prescriptions are ready. It’s working on similar patient notification applications for physician offices and pharmaceutical companies.

3Ci has done mobile applications work for national companies including AutoNation, AT&T and ESPN, mostly with cell phone mass messaging, billing and reservations. Mike FitzGibbon, 3Ci’s co-founder and president, said it spent much of the fourth quarter of 2009 and the first few months of 2010 planning its strategy for the health care market, where inefficiencies abound.

Health care is one of the few employment sectors that’s shown growth over the past year. The combination of aging baby boomers and increased access to medical services through the health care reform law should continue to make technology services for this industry a big market.

When it comes to being interactive with patients, health care is among the least technology savvy fields, FitzGibbon said, but 3Ci aims to change that.

One of the main targets for improvement is cutting down on medical appointment abandonment, he said. “Each appointment is worth a specific dollar amount and staff time,” FitzGibbon noted. “That’s lost revenue.”

Instead of having nurses and office staff call patients, 3Ci has designed an automatic text messaging application that alerts patients about their upcoming appointments. FitzGibbon said it’s more efficient than making calls, especially since some people don’t answer calls when they don’t recognize the incoming number.

For pharmaceutical companies, 3Ci is working on a text messaging application that would remind consumers when to take medications or order a refill. The pharmaceutical companies could also use the application to text coupons to consumers.

Sunrise-based Interim Healthcare is using a text-messaging system designed by 3Ci to contact its home health care providers in the field through mass messaging. The company often uses it to offer assignments and call multiple employees to the office, said Linda Shaub, Interim’s VP of marketing. While it’s not in all 312 of Interim’s offices yet, those that are using it have found it useful for communicating, she said.

John Styers, VP of corporate strategy at 3Ci, said the employee text messaging application has also been used by hospitals, including Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, Missouri, because it makes sure that requests for assistance reach employees quickly. 3Ci’s other mobile applications for hospitals are for patients: to give them health and wellness news, notify them of available test results and give billing information.

While 3Ci has many predesigned programs for health care companies, it also has the flexibility to customize programs to meet the needs of particular clients, Styers said. Most of the programs it is rolling out were developed by working with a few health care providers, and engineering solutions for them.

“We want to make mobile solutions easier to deploy,” he said “It’s getting the health care facility to crawl by implementing mobile solutions where they can see immediate results.”

More and more people are using text messaging and smart phones as primary forms of communications in their everyday lives. Walgreens is advancing the use of this technology with the launch of several new features including Prescription Text Alerts (powered by 3Cinteractive), a real-time service which notifies customers via text message when their prescriptions are ready. Walgreens has also re-launched its ground-breaking iPhone® application and mobile site, m.walgreens.com (information on all Walgreens mobile features and applications can be found at www.walgreens.com/gomobile).

Mark Wagner, Walgreens executive vice president of operations and community management, said, “Text alerts are a valuable time-saving tool, and [are] the latest example of how our mobile applications are further connecting the Web to Walgreens stores and pharmacies, giving customers on-the-go convenience wherever they are.”

New Walgreens mobile features include:

Prescription Text Alerts: Receive a text message from a Walgreens pharmacy when prescriptions are ready or if there are any status changes. Customers can sign up for text alerts at any Walgreens pharmacy or online at www.walgreens.com/gomobile. Text alerts are also available in Spanish
• Special Offer Texts: Customers can get information about exclusive Walgreens deals and coupons via text message. Messages also provide important information and the latest services available both in-store and online. Customers can sign up through the Walgreens mobile site or by texting Walgreens to 21525 (message and data rates may apply)
• iPhone Application: iPhone users can take advantage of new features and functionality in the iPhone application available through iTunes® in the iPhone App Store
• Android™ / BlackBerry® Mobile Website Application: BlackBerry and Android users can download the Walgreens mobile site application from their respective marketplaces (Android App Market™) and BlackBerry App World™, providing quick and easy access to the Walgreens mobile site features