PromoFarma

A strategy to optimise customer data and operations for 25% annual growth

PromoFarma, which belongs to DocMorris AG, is one of the main pharmaceutical e-commerce companies in Spain. Its platform sells more than 150,000 products from 7,000 brands, and its international reach continues to grow. Currently, it works with more than a thousand Spanish, French, and Italian pharmacies.

Due to the large number of customers and intermediaries they work with, the operations team plays an essential role within the company. Optimising the team’s performance was one of PromoFarma’s main goals as it began its digital transformation process. But, above all, their objective was to perfect the shopping experience across their marketplace, utilising a customer-focused approach.

Thanks to the expert advice of redk and the technology from our partners at Zendesk, they achieved results in a very short time:

• The volume of contacts per chat has increased by 20%.
• Currently, their chatbots handle 30% of the inquiries they receive.
• Customer satisfaction has increased by 93%.

Improving customer service

After adopting the new practices, the company saw improvements very quickly. Beatriz López, the operations manager, highlights “more complete reporting, greater monitoring of ticket escalation and a minimisation of external tools,” which has resulted in greater productivity.

The 20% increase in chat communications, together with the improved chatbots they use, has almost doubled the customer satisfaction rate, with a 93% increase. And the changes don’t stop there: Zendesk’s tool allows social media channels to be fully implemented to offer a linear service across communication channels.

Three operations teams

To understand the changes that were implemented at PromoFarma, we have to look at how the company is organised.

According to Beatriz López, the company is characterised by its ‘customer-focused approach’. In order to pay as much attention as possible to the different stakeholders, the company’s operations are managed by three teams:

• Sellers Success Team. This team deals with sellers. PromoFarma offers them a personal back office to manage their sales and a free help centre with telephone and chat support.
• Customer Success Team. This team helps customers use the website and navigate the purchase process. They also manage incidents and provide customer service by phone, chat, email, and social media.
• Delivery Team. This team works to collaborate with courier companies. They track order preparation, collection, dispatch, and delivery.

Key changes: digitalisation and chat communication

Customer habits have undergone huge changes in the last five years, partly due to the natural progression of the market and partly due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted the importance of telemedicine and the digitalisation of healthcare services. Marketplaces such as PromoFarma have seen a rise in their number of customers, leading them to rethink their work models.

The company had been working with Zendesk for eight years thanks to the implementation facilities on offer. But, over time, they decided that using their Support tool alone wasn’t enough and that they wanted to integrate all the Support Suite Enterprise channels into their operations. To do this, they turned to redk for advice and, with our help, adopted solutions such as:

• Zendesk Talk: a software for call centres.
• Zendesk Guide: an intelligent self-service tool.
• Zendesk Explore: a tool for analysis and reporting.

But there was one channel that deserved special attention: the chat service. Around half of the inquiries that PromoFarma received were related to the website and services, so implementing Zendesk Chat and boosting this type of communication benefitted both consumers and employees.

The result: more conversations and best practices

‘We gradually integrated the chat function across different pages of our website, before adding it to the home page,’ explains Beatriz. What’s more, PromoFarma assigned exclusive agents to chat management and, with redk’s advice, created shortcuts and macros to streamline queries. This allowed for simultaneous conversations with different customers.

In addition, thanks to the new software and redk’s expert advice, they were able to implement best practices in configuration and user experience by:

• Combining their three separate subsidiaries (PromoFarma, Doctipharma, and PromoFarma Sellers) into one.
• Setting up separate phone numbers and notifications from the different brands. This way, they could maintain separate workflows.
• Setting up specific dashboards and reports in Zendesk Explore.
• Incorporating a specific development plan for managing chats with users who take GDPR into account.

In short, with the help of redk, PromoFarma has been able to work in a more unified way, in line with its objective to provide a customer-focused experience, and to take full advantage of the software that our partners at Zendesk provide.