Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe to launch a world-class digital experience and customer insights platform to deliver personalized healthcare and purchasing offerings. It will provide Walgreens and Boots customers with products and services from its global pharmacy and retail businesses wherever, whenever and however they may want them. Installing this platform will push WBA into the second phase of its digital transformation, one of its key strategic priorities.
The strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe allows WBA to provide insights to deliver more engaging and personalized experiences while upholding and protecting the privacy choices of patients and customers. Data privacy and security are fundamental design principles in the development of technology, underscored by Microsoft’s investments in building a trusted cloud platform. This can help boost access to key services within pharmacy and beauty, among other categories, while driving accessibility and rendering more options to address daily needs.
For this new personalization platform, Walgreens will launch an individually tailored prescription experience for patients at Walgreens, and Boots will start a bespoke beauty experience for customers by enabling Boots Beauty Consultants to provide custom product recommendations. This new platform will also dramatically enhance WBA’s marketing effectiveness and power the company’s strategic initiative around mass personalization, which is to deliver the right offers and content to the right customer, in the proper context, at the right time and through the right channels.
Through this strategic partnership, Walgreens Boots Alliance is transforming the future of retail, health, and beauty, creating digital experiences that make shopping fun and rewarding. Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Adobe’s Experience Cloud will provide deep insights and a single view of the customer, enabling the nurturing of customer relationships on one platform for highly tailored experiences.
Shelley Bransten, CVP Retail and Consumer Goods Industries, Microsoft
The strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe is the cornerstone for these new WBA customer experiences, connecting WBA’s wealth of knowledge related to serving customers in the health, wellness, and beauty categories. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will serve as WBA’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) to provide a unified, 360-degree view of the customer and unlock insights that power personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s Customer Experience Management (CXM) solutions will enable the company to deliver those unmatched customer experiences, with the industry’s only end-to-end solution for analytics, content management, personalization, campaign orchestration and more.
At WBA, our mission is to deliver extraordinary experiences that enrich our customers’ lives. 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. This digital magic coupled with the valued knowledge and quality of care provided by our pharmacists and team members is what allows us to best serve our customers.
Vineet Mehra, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Walgreens Boots Alliance
A Busy 2020 for WBA
Also, the company entered into a multi-year Medicare agreement with UnitedHealthcare, which entails a new co-branded Medicare Advantage plan with Walgreens being the exclusive Retail Pharmacy company. The company opened four of the 14 targeted resource centers.
Within the Pharmaceutical Wholesale division, the company has been operating actively to support the ongoing healthcare crisis by providing medicines and advice to patients and by ensuring seamless operations of the supply chain. Additionally, the newly-formed joint venture with McKesson in Germany has already started to expand Walgreens Boots’ reach and scale in the notable German pharmaceutical wholesale market. This is predicted to have significantly contributed to the company’s fiscal third-quarter performance.
WBA is slated to release third-quarter fiscal 2020 results on Jul 9, before market open.
About Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.
Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA) is a global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy, touching millions of lives every day through dispensing and distributing medicines, its convenient retail locations, digital platforms, and health and beauty products. The company has more than 100 years of trusted health care heritage and innovation in community pharmacy and pharmaceutical wholesaling.
Including equity method investments, WBA has a presence in more than 25 countries, employs more than 440,000 people, and has more than 18,750 stores.
WBA’s purpose is to help people across the world lead healthier and happier lives. The company is proud of its contributions to healthy communities, a healthy planet, an inclusive workplace, and a sustainable marketplace. The company’s businesses have been recognized for their Corporate Social Responsibility. Walgreens was named to FORTUNE* magazine’s 2019 Companies that Change the World list and Boots UK was recognized as Responsible Business of the Year 2019-2020 by Business in the Community.
WBA is included in FORTUNE’s 2020 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies. This is the 27th consecutive year that WBA or its predecessor company, Walgreen Co., has been named to the list.
More company information is available at www.walgreensbootsalliance.com.
*© 2019, Fortune Media IP Limited. Used under license.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
About Adobe Experience Cloud
Adobe is reimagining Customer Experience Management (CXM) with Adobe Experience Cloud, the industry’s only end-to-end solution for experience creation, marketing, advertising, analytics, and commerce. Adobe Experience Cloud helps brands deliver consistent, continuous, and compelling B2C, B2B, and B2E experiences across customer touchpoints and channels—all while accelerating business growth. Unlike legacy enterprise platforms with static, siloed customer profiles, Adobe Experience Platform empowers companies to fully understand customers and make data actionable through Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI, and machine learning technology. Industry analysts have named Adobe a leader in over 20 major reports focused on experience—more than any other technology company.
About UnitedHealthcare
UnitedHealthcare is dedicated to helping people live healthier lives and making the health system work better for everyone by simplifying the health care experience, meeting consumer health and wellness needs, and sustaining trusted relationships with care providers. In the United States, UnitedHealthcare offers the full spectrum of health benefit programs for individuals, employers, and Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, and contracts directly with more than 1.2 million physicians and care professionals, and 6,500 hospitals and other care facilities nationwide. The company also provides health benefits and delivers care to people through owned and operated health care facilities in South America. UnitedHealthcare is one of the businesses of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), a diversified health care company. For more information, visit UnitedHealthcare at www.uhc.com or follow @UHC on Twitter.
[…] Meanwhile, Adobe and Microsoft have struck a partnership in sales and marketing software, which will make them go head-to-head with Salesforce. For example, Walgreens has signed a deal with ADBE and MSFT to provide a “consumer insights platform.” […]