The pharmacy chain has decided to boost its in-store offerings through the use of a customer’s own smartphone.
Now that about three quarters of all adults in the United States have smartphones, Walgreens has decided that this is an opportunity that is too good to pass up and it has now added mobile apps to its shopping experience in order to make sure that it is as easy and convenient as possible.
Three out of every four people in the U.S. also have a Walgreens within five miles of where they live.
This means that most people have both a smartphone and a local Walgreens, making mobile apps an ideal opportunity to reach out to customers and improve their experience in-store. By doing this, the chain is also hoping that it will encourage people to buy more, while they’re there. The idea has to do with providing the ultimate in convenience. This smartphone application makes it possible to conduct searches for products in the store, to learn more about what they’re seeing in front of them with connected devices, and even to obtain savings opportunities with digital coupons.
The mobile apps also allow customers to fill their prescriptions with a few taps of their smartphones.
At the time that this article was written, Walgreens had not revealed how many users its smartphone app actually had, but the application continually finds itself among the top 10 lifestyle apps within the Google Play and iOS stores.
According to the Walgreens director of digital commerce product management, Adam Crouch, “Offline and online have blurred in the minds of consumers, so almost everything we do digitally ties back to stores in some way.” He went on to add that “We’re figuring out how to use digital to take convenience to the next level.”
The pharmacy chain now has a team that is dedicated to rebuilding the company based on a kind of “digital DNA,” said Crouch, who also pointed out that the company’s primary focus is on customer convenience. By putting a digital strategy into place, it helps to make sure that Walgreens will be more flexible and capable of adapting to the latest consumer behavior and expectation trends, particularly when it comes to the shape of its mobile app.
The third most common mobile commerce category was gaming products, which were purchased by 19 percent of device owning Europeans. Other shopping categories included groceries (17 percent), music (16 percent) and travel (16 percent). All of this data was released in the ING International Survey on Mobile Banking, which was designed to take a closer look at the m-commerce habits of over 10,000 mobile device using consumers throughout Europe.