Medallia Talks with CVS Health
Hello everyone, and welcome to a very special Medallia Talks with CVS Health. Just a quick reminder to submit your questions via the Q & A tab in the chat, and we’ll answer as many audience questions as we can at the end of our interview. So let’s get started.
It’s my pleasure to introduce Jared Tancrelle. Jared is the Vice President of Store Operations and Business Support for CVS Health. He has a registered pharmacist with more than 10 years of experience in both retail and corporate settings. In this role, Jared brings an emphasis on service and driving innovative improvements to the customer and colleague experience across CVS Health’s more than 9900 stores and more than 190,000 field colleagues. Welcome, Jared.
Hey Elizabeth, thanks for having me.
Thanks for joining. So please tell us a little bit about your role and responsibilities in operations.
Yeah. So, as you mentioned, I lead our store operations and business support organization for the retail side of CVS Health, so CVS Pharmacy. And really my team is focused on helping our customers have the best experiences that they can and our colleagues deliver those awesome customer experiences. So, really the team’s all about developing strategies and implementing operations around communications, store support, workforce management, basically end to end across both the front of the store and the pharmacy. And everything that team does is really rooted in understanding our business from that customer and colleague perspective.
Motivation for Customer and Colleague Experience
Great question. I think from a very young age, I have like all of these memories of going into CVS with my grandfather like on a weekly basis, and he’d go in, he’d pick up his medications, he’d always buy me like some $2 toy on the way out, but it was that like trust and relationship that he had with the pharmacist that I think always really resonated with me, and inspired me to get into pharmacy. And then when I was actually practicing pharmacy, there were a couple of things that I think really stuck out. First, is that you realize that sometimes in healthcare settings, you see people at their most vulnerable stage. Whether they are recently diagnosed, they’re caring for a loved one that’s sick, the service that you offer those customers in those moments, whether it be in the front of the store or the pharmacy, is critical in helping to drive long-standing relationships, loyalty, and just really making sure that the customer feels good when they walk out the door. And it also helped me remember it’s our frontline colleagues that are the most important thing in building those relationships, and we need to do everything that we can to take care of them and make sure they’ve got the tools they need to do their jobs.
Embracing the Mission
Yeah. You know, I don’t – You talk a lot about purpose statements and mission statements, and I don’t know if there is a purpose statement in retail where colleagues play a more direct role and actually executing on that vision. Helping people on the path to better health, there’s just so many tangible ways that our colleagues do that even before the pandemic, right? Our pharmacists and our technicians, they work tirelessly every day to make sure people are saying inherent to their medications. Our front store colleagues help customers discover new products. Our care concierges in our health hubs help people discover new services. Every colleague I think really understands the connection that they serve to the customers and to our purpose. And I think throughout the pandemic, that connection grew even stronger. We did things like offer free delivery for patients, we provided access to testing, we’re helping the nation kind of get one step closer to our vaccination efforts, and just every step along the way. And our colleagues have really lived out that purpose.
Innovation and Customer-Centric Approach
We consistently use both data from our customers and intel from our colleagues to help really innovate our processes. We take a lot of looks at the friction that are in our model, so we can better improve the customer experience. For example, a couple years ago we were getting feedback from our customers about the dissatisfaction they had about the time waiting in line at our pharmacies. And as we started to get that feedback, it was the genesis of a lot of ideas that we launched in the digital space over the past couple of years. So the ability to pre-pay for a prescription and sign before you get to the store to make your drive through, your in-store experience faster. The ability to get those scripts delivered with just a few simple taps of your smartphone. A lot of that innovation was really rooted in understanding what are the friction points that the customers are telling us? Our colleagues also play critical roles in that. They’re a great resource for ideas, both things that make their lives easier and things that they see we can do to make their customers’ lives easier. And over the past few years we’ve implemented several enhancements to a point of sale, like our registers, by streamlining screens, eliminating unnecessary prompts, just to make it easier for both our customer and our colleague and all of which were suggested by our colleagues via our listening posts.
Navigating the Pandemic
Yeah, so we had two primary goals throughout the pandemic. The first was to protect our customers, and the second was to protect our colleagues. And it was especially important to us as an organization that really needed to continue to operate so we could provide patients with all of the care and all the convenience and medications, that they needed throughout the pandemic. So we used a lot of tools at our disposal to do that. The ideas platform, Our Medallia customer experience platform, to really understand what colleagues needed to feel safe, and how a lot of the measures that we were implementing were helping our customers. So just a couple examples, We frequently surveyed our colleagues throughout the pandemic, especially at the beginning to ensure that they had the adequate amount and the right types of PPE, personal protective equipment, for them to feel safe at work. We have about 200,000 colleagues in our stores, and in the first six months of the pandemic, we had distributed more than 20 million face masks, 70 million pairs of gloves, and 30 million ounces of hand sanitizer.
And that continued post the first six months of the pandemic, obviously, but just you know, things that we needed to do to make sure our colleagues felt comfortable coming to work, even with all of the unknowns towards the beginning parts of the pandemic. And we also wanted to make sure that we knew what our customers were experiencing. So we used the ask now feature of Medallia to pulse out questions to our customers just to get to their reactions to some of the procedures we were enacting in stores to keep them safe. And we also used it to understand customer sentiment as we were thinking about introducing new services. So things like COVID testing in our stores, whether it be the drive-through or the kiosk, it was really important for us to understand what customer concerns there might be, how to best implement that to make customers feel safe shopping in our stores. So it was really, really cool to see us utilize those tools and have it help drive the innovations that we did.
Adapting to Customer and Colleague Needs
Thanks for all the specific examples because I really think it helps the people in the audience understand some of the actions you had to take and how you actually really listen to your customers and colleagues. Many of our customers, I think, can relate to much of what you said, but in parallel to adjusting as a retailer, listening to the customer and colleague voice, you also had this herculean undertaking this last year preparing for vaccine distribution. Could you talk a little bit about how you mobilized for that?
Yeah. Something that we’re still living through as we speak actually. But we’ve been giving vaccines for years at CVS, so we had some familiarity with it, but even this was a significant undertaking. Providing safe and convenient access to vaccines are two of our guiding principles. And anyone that’s been looking and listening to the news knows a lot of the challenges that went into vaccine distribution. You had these new products that needed very different and very unique temperature storage requirements. There wasn’t and still isn’t a ton of vaccine out there. So we wanted to make sure that, you know, we were doing everything we could to mitigate waste, and to make sure every dose that we could was getting in an arm.
Each state had varying eligibility criteria, kind of for who should get the vaccine throughout the pandemic. So all of that pretty complex. And on top of that, we also had to take the show on the road. So we had about 40,000 long term care facilities that we had the opportunity to be able to provide vaccines to both their residents and their colleagues, and we executed about 90,000 clinics in a three-month time period in order to be able to support that. So just a lot of logistical complexity in addition to learning these new products. And you know, it was really important that we kept the customer in mind throughout all that, right? Because there’s the logistical aspect of it, but then there’s also the importance of what the customers will feel and experience. And just some things top of mind for us were making sure everyone got both doses, making sure that everybody that came into our store had a great experience, And I think also importantly, that there was access to the vaccine. So no matter what community someone lived in, Whether it’s the most vulnerable community or one of our normal communities in the US, we want to make sure that there was just easy access to everybody. And those are some of the things that, we had to think about and manage as we were getting ready for vaccine distribution.
Customer and Colleague Feedback in Vaccine Distribution
I think that’s one of the things that has been so impressive to watch. And also, just thinking about the challenges you’ve gone through just to manage both the operational and customer experience at the same time and kind of maybe even more so than you have during regular flu seasons and so forth. I think if you – Is there anything in particular around, feedback or changes that you’ve made to really help deal with those challenges?
Yeah. I mentioned the number of clinics that we did earlier, just how we were thinking about starting the vaccine distribution process, one of the things that we had to do was upscale close to 20,000 of our pharmacy technicians to be immunizers. So traditionally we only really use our pharmacists, but there – we needed to kind of bolster that workforce. So that helped us do a couple of things. One, I think it created another kind of deep connection to our purpose, gave another group of our colleague population a different way to be able to serve consumers work at the top of their licenses, really, you know, teach them some skills that they could keep with them forever. Which was awesome, right? And it’s really, really inspiring to see these technicians that like trained, hard to become immunizers, out on the floor giving shots, developing those relationships with customers. So, that’s exciting. During flu season, we usually get the two pieces of feedback from our customers. One, they tell us that sometimes the core pharmacy experience tends to suffer a bit, because the pharmacists are giving flu shots and they’re checking scripts and their counseling patients. And two, in some of our locations, the experience needed to be a little bit more personal, and a little bit more private. So when we were thinking about our strategy for delivering the Covid vaccine in stores, One of the things that we did that was a bit unique, is that we deliberately created these dedicated clinic models, where we created a system that allowed us to vaccinate a large number of people with a dedicated staff in a sectioned off area of the store.
Which not only preserved the core pharmacy experience, but created a very personalized, dedicated, and private experience for customers that were coming through for their Covid vaccine.
Customer-Centric Approach
We also thought about the experience from a customer point of view, right? Because there were a lot of those customers were coming into our stores for the first time, they were experiencing our team members for the first time, a lot of them are nervous about getting the vaccine. So we said alright, what can we do to introduce new roles or introduce new ways to engage with the customer in the store?
For those of you that might have had the clinic experience in one of our stores, you know that the first thing that you saw when you came in was a greeter, that was stationed at the front of every pharmacy, and they were there to help people check in, answer questions about what the experience would be, help walk them through, kind of like how they were gonna navigate through the store, help make sure that we were social distancing properly, etc.
Enhancing the Vaccine Experience
Then our customers had a great experience with vaccinators, but after that, we introduced another new role, which was a dedicated support person who is there to observe customers after the vaccine, make sure they didn’t have any unwanted side effects, answer any other questions that the customer had after their vaccine schedule. So we really took the whole experience from a customer-first perspective, from the moment they made an appointment with us digitally, to the moment they left the store after their – 15-30 minutes after they got their vaccine to make sure it was a great experience.
Customer and Colleague Response
Well, from the chat, I can see that everyone is very thankful and impressed by innovations that you’ve driven, especially given through this time. And you recently surpassed 17 million vaccines delivered, which is just incredible. What has been the response from your customers and your colleagues?
Yeah, customer response has been incredible. So, we’ve seen some of our highest service, overall satisfaction scores and Net Promoter Scores related to getting the vaccine than we have compared to any other NPS or OSAT measurement that we’ve had to date.
Motivation and Recognition
We’re super proud of our teams for their ability to deliver those service experiences, and I think one of the things that is the most motivating for us at the office and for our teams on the ground, it’s really the stories that we hear from our pharmacists, our technicians, our front store colleagues about the people that they’ve connected with. That’s been a huge motivator.
We also use videos from customers implemented with Medallia, the ability for customers to record videos after their experiences when they’re filling out their satisfaction surveys, and that was super motivating and a great way that we recognized colleagues and really kept them going throughout the pandemic.
Adapting Feedback Methods
I think that relates to one of the questions I see in the chat. So they asked if you had any changes to the way that you capture customer feedback with Covid, and how did that impact customer insights, and video is one thing that you added in this time, correct? Are there any other things that you point to that, you know, changed and or ways in which you use the impact of the insights that you had?
Yeah, I would say video was one of the keys, and then one of the other things just thinking differently about what questions we might want to start asking customers about in the future. We’ve always asked about the environment that the customers are in when they’re in the stores, but for me really thinking differently about those questions that we ask, especially as we move towards more and more healthcare services, is going to be critical.
Leveraging Data for Health Innovation
Looking to the other side of the vaccine, how else is CVS using customer and colleague data to reinvent health?
Yeah. You know, for me, and from my seat and the role that I play, one of my goals is to really have industry-leading retention, kind of from hire to retire, for our frontline colleagues. So using feedback from colleagues to improve their employment experience is one of my huge focuses as we come out of the pandemic. Also, I think using the data to understand that CVS Health consumer experience end to end is key.
We learned a lot from the Covid vaccine to be able to measure, like I mentioned earlier, from the moment they make an appointment to the moment they walk out the door. So really looking for other ways to measure that end to end experience, whether it be in the hubs or in other parts of the business and how that relates to the retail experience, that I think will be key.
Closing Remarks
Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. It’s great to be able to share the story with everybody, and hope everyone has a great day. Thank you, and to everyone in the audience, thank you so much for joining us. Please share your feedback if prompted with the digital survey and have a great day.