Walgreens Boots Alliance boosts customer service with chatbots built on Microsoft Azure

Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) operates multiple chains of health and beauty retail stores and pharmacies, with thousands of locations around the world. The company’s flagship brands are Walgreens in the United States and Boots in the United Kingdom. Across all of its stores and websites, WBA strives to help customers find the products, services, and care they need to lead healthier and happier lives.

One way that WBA is helping its customers access healthcare resources and get answers to health-related questions is by adding chatbots to its websites, including Walgreens.com and Boots.com. WBA added a COVID-19 Risk Assessment bot to the Find Care section of the Walgreens website. And on the Boots website, the company implemented a more generalized assistant bot that can answer common questions and help customers handle prescription-related matters. WBA built both bots with Microsoft technologies.

Adding bot technology to the WBA websites fits in well with the company’s general philosophy of reducing friction for customers at all possible touch points. “In the early 90s, we pioneered the drive-through pharmacy to reduce the friction involved in filling prescriptions,” says Greg Orr, Vice President, Digital Health at Walgreens Boots Alliance. “We think there is a tremendous opportunity for bots to be similarly transformational in helping customers get information and connect with healthcare resources.”

A strategic partnership built on Microsoft Azure

The goal of the Walgreens Find Care webpage is to make it as easy as possible for individuals to connect with healthcare solutions based on where they are, what they need, and their eligibility. In addition to providing services in Walgreens stores, Walgreens has many partnerships with healthcare providers, including telemedicine providers, across the United States.

“As we grew Find Care, we quickly realized that it is not just a great care navigation and management platform to organize the offers that we and our partners have,” explains Giovanni Monti, Senior Vice President, Healthcare Services at Walgreens Boots Alliance. “It’s also a way to grow a marketplace and attract more partners to build the Walgreens brand in new ways and create a deeper healthcare relationship with our customers.”

Find Care offers solutions for both acute and chronic needs. These solutions range from online consultations or telehealth conversations for acute situations to resources for managing chronic conditions like diabetes or COPD through connected devices and digital therapeutics.

After looking at the possibilities of cloud infrastructure for a few years, WBA established a strategic partnership with Microsoft in January 2019 that includes the use of Microsoft Azure as the WBA cloud platform of choice. As part of an overall corporate digital transformation, WBA has been moving IT resources to the cloud, and that cloud effort has inspired the Find Care team to investigate the possibilities that Azure provides.

“We found that Azure offers a wide variety of services that we can use to improve our care delivery platform,” says Alex Yakhnis, Head of Delivery and Engineering for Digital and Consumer Technology at Walgreens Boots Alliance. “We can scale quickly with Azure, and Azure provides a high level of security and compliance, including HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] certification, which is important in any healthcare scenario.”

For more information about the overall digital transformation at WBA, read this case study.

A bot for common concerns about a global pandemic

As the effects of COVID-19 spread around the globe, WBA saw a tremendous spike in interest in Find Care. The company wanted to make sure that customers using the site could actually find the care they need.

“One of the things I think we’ve done quite well has been to grow the Find Care marketplace from both the partner management side and the product side,” says Monti. “Working with Microsoft, we’ve been able to quickly onboard a lot more telehealth providers onto Find Care because we have a very solid, scalable architecture built on Azure.”

Prior to COVID-19, WBA had already been investigating the possibilities of the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service to add valuable functionality to Find Care. The Healthcare Bot service combines built-in medical intelligence with natural language capabilities that make it easy for organizations to build and deploy an AI-powered, compliant, conversational healthcare experience at scale.

“Using the Healthcare Bot service, we can offer a more personalized experience, and we were working on a variety of use cases before COVID-19,” explains Monti. “But with the onset of COVID-19, we quickly realized that it might actually be the ideal first use case for the Healthcare Bot service on Find Care.”

So, the Find Care team created a COVID-19 Risk Assessment bot and added it to the Find Care webpage. The bot uses a chat interface to help customers determine their risk of having COVID-19 based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. 

“We wanted to build a solution that would reduce the friction for customers trying to determine whether or not they need to go see their doctor,” says Orr. “Rather than going to a government health website and trying to filter through all the rules there, customers can answer a series of simple questions and get an answer from the bot about their risk level based on CDC guidelines. And if they need to see a doctor, we can help them find one through our telehealth partners.”

Adds Ankur Jain, Principal Architect, Digital Engineering at Walgreens Boots Alliance, “Because of the work Microsoft had already put into developing the Healthcare Bot service, we were able to put our COVID-19 response chatbot into production in less than a week once we decided to move forward with it.”

With the rapidly evolving nature of the COVID-19 situation, the CDC guidelines were constantly updating, and the Find Care team found that it was easy to keep the bot up to date because of the straightforward programming involved in the Healthcare Bot service. “We had a scheduled time to sit down and determine whether we needed to change our questioning based on the latest CDC guidance,” says Orr. “And we were able to use the administrator tool to make those changes to our Risk Assessment bot in near real time. After a quick test, we could deploy in seconds.”

The Risk Assessment bot quickly racked up thousands of uses, and the Find Care team monitored the results to ensure that the tool was helping as planned. The team found that the bot had two main benefits. In addition to directing those at high risk to a healthcare provider, the bot also helped assuage those at low relative risk and keep them from overburdening the health system and potentially exposing themselves to COVID-19 in an emergency room situation.

“It’s been fantastic to see how the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service has helped us do the right things for our customers and, just as importantly, for our medical service providers, by directing folks to telemedicine as opposed to driving down to the hospital,” says Orr. “In normal times, telemedicine may be a convenience, but with COVID-19, it really becomes a necessity in some cases.”

Improved customer service with a question-and-answer bot

In the United Kingdom, WBA operates 3,000 Boots retail outlets, and the company considers the Boots.com website to be its flagship store as online retail grows around the world. The site includes retail healthcare and beauty product sales. The company has also launched a pharmacy site to help customers fill prescriptions and access healthcare in new and innovative ways, such as online clinics—similar to what is available on Find Care in the United States.

For the development team working on expanding Boots.com functionality, the strategic partnership between WBA and Microsoft has brought great technological benefits. “For me, Azure is an amazing service that provides a huge wealth of functionality,” says Steve Westgarth, Engineering Manager at Boots UK. “From a development point of view, it’s an absolute pleasure to work with. It’s great to see how Microsoft keeps investing so heavily in Azure, making exciting new tools available on almost a daily basis.”

Like the Find Care team, the Boots.com team had been investigating the use of bots on the website, but the Boots.com team had kept those plans on the back burner. Once again, COVID-19 accelerated the timeline.

“When COVID-19 hit, we saw a huge increase in the call volume coming into our call center from customers wanting support, advice, and answers to common questions,” says Westgarth. “It became a massive staffing issue for us to be able to provide all of those answers to our customers. We thought it would be great if we could provide our customers with a chatbot to answer frequently asked questions without the need to wait on the phone for a call center agent.”

Because WBA was already using Azure, the Boots.com team found it straightforward to spin up a bot using Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and start building out a new tool for customers. An initial proof of concept generated a lot of enthusiasm within the business. “When people can see new ideas coming to life very quickly, they get excited and want to get onboard with the project,” says Westgarth.

The first iteration of the Boots.com bot provides answers to pharmacy services questions so that customers don’t need to call in for assistance. The bot can help with refill orders, prescription delivery, and other common needs. The initial response from customers was great, with nearly 2,500 interactions in just the first 24 hours. The development team has been using the analytics capabilities in Azure to track how customers are using the bot.

“We can look at the anonymized questions customers are asking and get insight into what’s worrying them right now,” says Westgarth. “We can then tweak the programming to ensure that we’re providing the answers that customers want. Because of the flexibility of Azure Bot Service deployment, we can update the bot frequently during the day, so it becomes visibly more intelligent to our customers.”

The Boots.com team used QnA Maker, a part of Azure Cognitive Services, to help expedite the bot creation. “QnA Maker was a really easy tool for the business to use to write up all of their questions with minimal training,” says Westgarth. “They were able to pick that up and just run with it, which was awesome to see. We now have an automated continuous integration, continuous deployment process all built on Azure. The whole thing was incredibly straightforward.”

Based on the success of the bot so far, WBA plans to expand the functionality of the Boots.com pharmacy bot to include things like specific order information and other features to improve the customer experience. “We’re a large company, and we’ve had people in a variety of different divisions and departments come to us and say they’d love to have a chatbot on their website or social media account,” says Westgarth. “Our goal is to have one Boots chatbot that can be applied to all the different use cases with a common knowledge base. Like everything we do at WBA, it’s all about meeting our customers where they are and giving them the great service they expect from our brands.”

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