Farmacias Especializadas lifts sales with Oracle Cloud

Operating for more than 40 years in Mexico, Farmacias Especializadas (FESA) sells and distributes pharmaceuticals, particularly highly specialized medications, as well as other health-related products and services.

FESA focuses on drugs for chronic, degenerative, or serious diseases. For certain medications, the pharmacy is the only authorized distributor in Mexico. For that reason, the company has outlets and warehouses throughout the country, with inventory to ensure adequate supplies.

The pharmacy wanted to improve customer experience and better manage high-cost inventory to ensure product availability. It needed to move to the cloud to better manage loyalty programs, follow up on repurchases, and maintain a complete view of its customers. With FESA’s on-premises infrastructure aging, a more flexible, scalable, and efficient approach was considered.

Part of FESA’s infrastructure was already powered by Oracle. Therefore, business leaders thought migrating to Oracle Cloud would be simpler and less expensive and would result in a more robust platform.

Moreover, Oracle had already proven to be a strong business partner, so it was natural to choose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle CX.

After migrating to Oracle Exadata Cloud Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, FESA realized cost savings with less IT administration and higher performance, a fast implementation timeline, and a 70% improvement in customer engagement time.

Likewise, the total length of customer calls was reduced by 40%, thanks to systems being better adapted to the specific needs of each call.

In addition, Farmacias Especializadas gained a 360-degree view of the entire product flow. From the moment a customer call comes in, the company knows if that call is for a product repurchase, whether the caller is a member of a loyalty program, and other details that can help the customer make a purchase.

“The contact center operator has much more visibility now and can offer the customer suggested products: membership to a follow-up service for treatment, membership to loyalty programs that can offer benefits, discounts, gifts, and so on,” says Villalobos.

The new platform also helped automate the patient follow-up process. Now FESA can proactively find out when a customer’s medication for a chronic illness will run out and calls the customer to avoid any interruption in medical treatment.

“In the end, that translates into benefits for patients and for the insurers that covers their expenses, as well as for us, who manage the medication supply,” says Villalobos. “Sales have improved by nearly 15% since the technology was implemented."

Overall, the customer’s shopping experience has improved across all sales channels—point of sale, contact center, and soon, ecommerce—as the customer feedback tools show. The cloud migration has enabled the company’s IT staff to focus on solving business needs and stop worrying about maintenance and other routine tasks.

Farmacias Especializadas worked with partner Technology Adoption on the migration.