How TerryWhite Chemmart increased its customer satisfaction

Franchise chemist retailer's marketing chief talks through the marketing strategy, data and customer approach helping it lift its customer satisfaction scores

TerryWhite Chemmart has taken a customer-first approach across its entire operation, and has improved its customer satisfaction rating as a result.

New Roy Morgan customer satisfaction rating shows TerryWhite Chemmart with a high satisfaction rating of 94 per cent, ahead of all other major Australian pharmacies. And that’s not all: The business also managed to improve unprompted brand awareness and advertising awareness with its latest campaign ‘That’s real chemistry.’

This wasn’t however, an overnight success as the stats might indicate. Rather it was a whole of business initiative over the last two years which is hoped will grow into hypersegmentation into the future.

As TerryWhite Chemmart CMO, Janice Hoogeveen, explains, the company merged three businesses into one back in 2017. Since then, the business has been at looking who its customers are, and its clear point of difference relative to competitors.

“It wasn't really until our brand campaign in March this year we really found our success formula,” Hoogeveen told CMO. “I started in the business in July 2018 and identified a need to look for a new agency partner.

“Through working with them on the brief, we identified a positioning, which is really using our strengths. We unashamedly stand for health and what we can do to help in terms of health. Our customer base tends to be an older customer, over the age of 50, and we're very much focused on what they need at this stage of their journey.

“We spent a lot of time trying to truly understand what the 50-plus female is looking for across not just their health journey, but  other interests and how can we really speak to that.”

This led to the brand position, ‘That's real chemistry’, which spoke to the relationship and promise from pharmacy staff with customers.

“We wanted to push our pharmacists front and centre of owning that relationship with the customer," Hoogeveen continued. "They are really proud of this relationship. We have a whole training program around our differences in expert advice and genuine care, which we identified as being very important for our customer.

“We did qualitative and quantitative research into what our customers want, and have a rewards loyalty database of about 2.5 million subscribers. That’s a lot of data." 

Hoogeveen has worked in multiple industries, where this female customer has tended to be the core customer. "No matter whether they're shopping in pharmacies, or donating to the World Flying Doctor Service, or buying dairy products, or buying ice cream, or buying vitamins, the quintessential need of those women is essentially the same," she said. 

“The benefit for me was that I've had lots of opportunity to learn about these women from different category lenses. But fundamentally, not to be simplistic about it, there is a is a core proposition, which is 50-year old women still consider themselves to be extremely vibrant, extremely involved, and engaged. We love that.”

Given the older demographic, TerryWhite's choice of marketing channels has included a mix of Facebook and digital, TV and out-of-home, with TV taking up to 55 per cent of total spend.

“I have had people at times challenge me to look at some of those more current channels, but I don’t want to waste time and money," Hoogeveen commented. "Then we invested a lot of time in email campaigns, which we target through the loyalty program."

Partnerships

Another digital-led initiative has been working with Stocard, a digital wallet for credit cards, to build offers and target people when they are approaching the vicinity of a TerryWhite store. Hoogeveen said it's used that channel to convey retail offers at certain periods with success. 

Data partnerships are also key to gather even more insight into customers via a martech stack TerryWhite is building. These have included an exclusive partnership with Qantas in the pharmacy space. The pair launched their partnership in August and undertook a dedicated campaign for consumers to go into the draw to win a million points for the six weeks leading up to Christmas.

TerryWhite is also working with Qantas' data agency, Red Planet, to use their collective knowledge of customers to target messaging appropriately.

“We also partnered with Bupa and we've partnered with Afterpay as well, which is great because it has a younger demographic," Hoogeveen said. "The great thing about these databases is the ability to leverage each other's strengths in those areas."

Keeping up momentum

"We're a franchisee business, which makes the whole customer satisfaction scores even more exciting for us," Hoogeveen said.

“When I presented that campaign back in March, what I saw is for the first time was the real importance of the store owner as my customer... they really are ambassadors of the brand. Because we've tapped into an existing truth and amplified it, and people are proud of it, they've actually taken it on-board."

Since campaign launch, TerryWhite has increased unprompted brand awareness and unprompted advertising awareness against its general target and core target audiences. Of course Hoogeveen sees plenty of opportunity to grow and develop the brand's strong CX momentum in 2020, and cited loyalty as a focal point.

“With loyalty you can measure and track it directly, which gives us great case study to be able to go back to our pharmacies and then give evidence-based recommendations," she said. 

In the coming year, the brand also hopes to drill down even further into personalisation via segmentation and data, while avoiding the creep and intrusive line pharmacies do have to regularly skirt around. Personalisation is a major focus for the first six months of 2020 with the aim of rolling out personalised website landing pages and EDMs first.

“We have to be really careful of the creepy line. Obviously, our focus is more on what we call front-of-store and past behaviour. We wouldn't be using anything to do with scripts information to target customers," Hoogeveen said. “While we can understand different profile-like characteristics of potential and past customers, we can’t and wouldn’t want to look at medication they’ve bought.

“But there are plenty of opportunities for us. When we did our ‘that’s real chemistry’ launch, we chose the opportunity to focus on certain health conditions. So we did pain, blood pressure, allergy and then winter defence, cold and flu. We also administer the flu vaccine."

The ambition is to seek new segments as the team moves forward. This will see all of TerryWhite's content strategy based on hypersegmentation.

"If we could, we would look at all the conditions that people can suffer. I know that some pharmacies are targeting content strategies around 3000 ailments, but we need to walk before we run," Hoogeveen said. "We know what the top conditions are. We know what the top services are. We researched all that. So we're starting with some priorities and building from there.”

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, follow our regular updates via CMO Australia's Linkedin company page, or join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia. 

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