CVS Plans To Roll Out Curbside Pickup Service

What Happened
On Tuesday, CVS launched a new curbside pickup service called “CVS Express,” allowing customers to order items using CVS’s mobile app and get their orders delivered to their cars when they drive up to the store. This service is currently available at 350 CVS locations in select cities, but the company says it is planning to roll out curbside pickups to its 9,600 retail locations across the country soon. CVS also announced it is investing in Palo Alto-based shopping startup Curbside, whose technology is powering the new experience.

What Retailers Need To Do
With this new pickup service, CVS is making a strong push toward mobile ordering, offering customers a frictionless shopping experience and allowing them to skip checkout lines and receive their orders within hours. As same-day delivery services continue to gain popularity, retailers need to cater to increasing consumer demand for convenience and instant gratification and make an effort to bridge the retail experience across online and offline channels.

For more information on how retailers can modernize their user experiences to better engage with shoppers, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 


Source: TechCrunch

CVS Taps Into IBM’s Watson For Smart Health Monitoring

What Happened
CVS Health has announced a new partnership with IBM to tap into its Watson computing system to help analyze and interpret health data from patient’s health records, pharmacy information and other resources. The goal is said to be leveraging Watson’s cognitive computing power to aid CVS Health nurses and pharmacists, as well as improving healthcare management and prevention for patients with chronic diseases.

What Brands Should Do
For heathcare and pharmaceutical brands, it has become increasingly crucial to keep up with the new opportunities that technologies, especially advances in mobile devices and biometric sensors, presents. Apple recently gave the go ahead to for-profit use of its ResearchKit, which can be utilized to scale data acquisition and facilitate medical trials. For brands of all types, it’d be smart to look into the cognitive capability of Watson and other machine learning services, which can provide new solutions in analyzing and understanding customer data.

 

Source: TechCrunch