The advancement of digital technology has added immense convenience to the consumer’s life. This convenience is proving to be valuable to some industries more than others. When we look at the healthcare industry, timely treatment and medication are what save lives. PharmEasy ensures that customers receive the meds they need in a minimal timeframe. The company, founded in 2014 by Dharmil Sheth and Dhaval Shah, is an online pharmacy. Customers can place their orders on the app and PharmEasy will connect with a registered retail pharmacy and deliver the order to the customer’s doorstep. Apart from medicines, the platform offers healthcare products too like surgical dressings, personal care products, healthcare devices, and fitness supplements, among others. PharmEasy has close to 1000 manufacturers, 55,000 distributors, and over 800,000 stores across 1000 cities in India. This business model needed to be digitized for it to run successfully. However, while the Indian audience warmed up to online shopping, buying meds online still faced some scepticism. Here’s how they fixed it.
Deep Dive Into Customer Behavior
Users were exploring the app but then abandoning the cart. It posed to be quite a challenge. PharmEasy partnered with CleverTap, a customer engagement and retention platform backed by AI technology to address this. CleverTap assisted PharmEasy in understanding who their customers are and what it is they’re exploring or looking for on the app. By analyzing the user journey, it was possible to pinpoint why and when they are checking out or abandoning the cart. This led to the creation of strategies and marketing campaigns that increased engagement and conversions on the platform. The AI analytics and engagement tools helped curate customized content that was specific to the customer’s preference.
Personalized User Experience
“All we wanted was to create an improved personalized experience so as to prevent user drop-offs at critical steps across the app. The major challenge that we faced was engaging users across multiple touchpoints during their browse or purchase journey on the app,” says Nitin Chugh, Head of CRM at PharmEasy. At this point, understanding customer behaviour was vital for effective user segmentation. The CleverTap platform has trigger campaigns and native displays that helped them create personalized user experiences. The search page, product details page, and thank you page was spruced up to make the buyer experience contextual and effective by using this Native Display Campaign feature. CleverTap has assisted PharmEasy to understand and analyse buyer behaviour in depth. The platform saw a 1.5-2x increase in conversions after this.
Data-driven Communication
AI provides real-time data that has helped PharmEasy communicate with its audience in an advanced manner. Personalized brand communication has led to an increase in customer satisfaction and retention. The push notifications and email campaigns are much more effective now because of the ample market data coming in from various touchpoints. “The CRM team at PharmEasy has seen their campaign CTRs jump by 10x using push templates. The CTRs for our email campaigns have seen similar improvements,” says Chugh. The automated segmentation has also helped the support team address the queries and requests that come in, thereby boosting the ORM. For operational excellence and an enhanced user experience, the tech team leverages a lot of ML solutions too like Tensorflow, Hadoop, HBase, Hive, Spark, and Kafka.
Covid-19 Awareness
Since PharmEasy sells testing kits on the app, they’ve tapped into social awareness and responsibility campaigns too. Being present in a number of states, there’s a communication campaign where state-specific information is sent out with regards to the current rules and guidelines set by the state. You can also find information on vaccination centres and emergency numbers. When one would experience a few Covid-19 symptoms or had been in a crowd and wanted to be precautious, they would visit the nearest hospital for a test. However, this in itself was risky because of the number of people at the hospital. To address this, the platform now has an AI-powered Bot that will analyze the risk of Covid-19 for an individual. All you’ve got to do is answer a few simple questions like any symptoms being experienced, travel history, and where and how many people you’ve come in contact with. On assessing this data along with your medical history and age, the bot will determine the risk of you contracting the virus. This reduced panic among the citizens and was a smart move by PharmEasy. So, instead of risking being among people, possibly infected people, and adding to the already immense pressure on the healthcare staff, this bot proved to be resourceful.
PharmEasy plans on having a Covid Free India initiative by delivering healthcare communication across the nation. The e-pharmacy market in India is expected to grow rapidly and reach $3 billion by 2024 according to Kuick Research. “Going forward, the company shall focus on evolving from a simple medicine delivery platform to a one-stop solution for all health care needs. In this process of building a one-stop solution, we have plans to build some great products on our platform using AI and ML techniques.”, says Bhaskar Raju Konduru, Chief Engineering Officer, PharmEasy.
Source: indiaai.gov.in
