“Every interaction or moment you have to be there for a customer or patient has the chance to earn their trust, create value for them and earn brand loyalty.” — Matt Harker, VP of Global Marketing Strategy and Transformation, Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) and 2021 Adobe Experience Maker Executive of the Year, Americas
Long before our new digital-normal, you could go to a drugstore or pharmacy and see a friendly face — someone you trusted to answer your questions and give their advice.
Such an experience is difficult to replicate at scale, especially in a world that has now gone digital.
The shift to direct, relevant, one-on-one communications became more urgent during the global pandemic — but one of the world’s largest retail and wholesale pharmacy brands was already moving towards a new strategy of mass personalization in early 2020.
Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) serves over 120 million customers with over 11,000 storefronts across the US and UK. The company competes with an increasing number of online and brick-and-mortar retailers who serve consumers directly for health-related products and services.
Below, Matt Harker, winner of the 2021 Experience Maker Executive of the Year for the Americas talks about the ingredients behind his win, and his advice for all on the journey to personalized experiences at scale in industries as highly regulated as healthcare.
Balancing privacy and personalization
The healthcare industry has been faced with rapidly shifting expectations — patients and shoppers want that same relevant experience that other industries have made standard, giving providers, payers, retailers, and pharmacies an opportunity to engage in more personalized ways.
However, personal health information is federally protected by HIPAA and there are important controls over whether and how this data is used for marketing purposes. When the COVID-19 pandemic created a global health crisis, Harker led the conversation at WBA to leverage Adobe Experience Cloud to create and send messaging about getting vaccinated.
To ensure compliance, the chief privacy officers of WBA were involved from the beginning, under a mantra Harker described as “privacy by design.”
“We call it privacy by design — they shape it from day one, because there are so many choices along the way that, that if you start as a team, you get there faster and have a stronger outcome that meets everybody's requirements,” Harker explained.
The team negotiated an approach that would remain HIPAA compliant while supporting large-scale individualized messaging based on the first-party customer data provided through experiences like their highly effective customer loyalty program, myWalgreens.
The myWalgreens app and website offer highly specific and relevant experiences that encourage the sustained engagement of customers, driving brand loyalty, repeat business, and revenue while honoring preferences and protecting customer privacy.