CVS Pharmacy

Introduction

The main purpose of this study is to make an analysis of CVS Pharmacy. CVS/Pharmacy is the nation's largest retail pharmacy chain, with approximately 6,200 stores across 38 states. With more than 40 years of dynamic growth in the retail pharmacy industry, CVS generates more than 68 percent of its revenue from the pharmacy business and is committed to providing superior customer service - making itself the easiest pharmacy retailer for customers to use. CVS/pharmacy fills more than one of every seven retail prescriptions in America. The Extra Care program boasts more than 50 million cardholders, making it the largest and most successful retail loyalty program in the country.

Analysis

Many organizations and contact centres have turned to a variety of point solutions to handle multichannel customer service - installing an interactive voice response (IVR) system for incoming calls, a dialer to handle outgoing contacts, and a separate system to manage email and Web requests. The problem with that approach is that service operation is disjointed, resulting in a customer experience that can be inconsistent and less than optimal.

This was the situation for CVS; its management was unable to get a complete, centralized picture of service across all channels because comparing reports generated by the disparate systems was akin to comparing apples to oranges. While the company maintained a team of 48 service agents in-house, it outsourced the IVR component of its operation, which was costly. Callers to the IVR system encountered delays and email and Web response times which were managed separately from other channels, making them difficult to track. CVS also needed a quality management solution to record customer interactions and use in agent training.

CVS was challenged with an ongoing strain of limited resources to meet its objectives and help integrate its applications. After years of developing applications in the legacy predictive dialer and creating outbound IVR programs with an outside vendor, CVS clearly needed a solution with multiple capabilities from a vendor that could provide a high level of services to transition current applications and data management using existing IT processes seamlessly.

CVS' deployment of a unified contact centre platform has yielded a number of benefits, including cost savings. By eliminating its outsourcing costs, the company covered the cost of the Aspect® Unified IP™ implementation. In addition, CVS has seen enhanced service, improved customer response times, increased agent performance and the ability to deliver a more consistent and satisfying service experience overall. The most important advantage of the solution, however, is that it integrates all of CVS' critical contact centre applications on a single platform, which in turn supports the company's unified service strategy.

In determining specific ROI, CVS calculated it has reduced its outside vendor spend by well over 50 percent. Additionally, the company has improved agent performance through true blending of inbound-outbound email functionality because they are able to more efficiently manage those interactions.

Other tangible benefits include improved email response time. CVS is able to do suggested response, auto response, and can measure the length of ...