ACRE Pharmacy grows revenues by 120% with Salesforce

ACRE Pharmacy supplies clinics and pharmacies with medical and aesthetic products such as dermal fillers and anti-wrinkle treatments, helping their customers stay healthy and look great. It’s a subsidiary of CST Pharma Group and uses its heritage to apply years of pharmaceutical knowledge to the emerging aesthetics market.

Manual processes and complicated compliance checks slow down the digital buying experience.

ACRE Pharmacy wanted to give customers a consumer-like online shopping experience, getting them onboarded quickly, displaying relevant products, and having prescriptions checked and processed for next-day delivery. Behind the scenes, that required centralising data and systems on one platform and being able to customise it to suit a heavily regulated industry and product base.

Running the entire business on a central platform.

ACRE Pharmacy implemented Salesforce and works with Salesforce Partner, CloudRoute, to tailor the platform for its changing needs. Over six years, together they have grown the platform from a foundational CRM into a multi-cloud environment supporting the entire business.

Everyone at ACRE Pharmacy uses Salesforce, from the customer service team and pharmacy operations to warehouse staff and sales. And the free online learning platform, Trailhead, is all they need to get up to speed. Staff aren’t just using Salesforce, they’re actively invested in making it work for them — requesting efficiency tweaks to workflows that the team can roll out in just one day. The company proactively monitors how customers and staff use the platform, so it knows where to focus for maximum impact. It always aspires to use Salesforce to the best of its ability and keep developing new and better functionality.

Turning six years of data into actionable insights.

After creating a single source of truth, ACRE Pharmacy knew it could get even deeper insights using Data 360. The solution unifies data and surfaces tailored insights for different users. These appear on the dashboards that staff already use and answer common queries at a glance. For example, how many invoices a customer has outstanding, their total spend, their propensity score, and the key accounts to nurture for company growth.

ACRE Pharmacy is currently working on connecting Google Analytics to learn which channels bring in the most new leads and drive growth. This will help allocate advertising budget to activities that have the highest return on investment (ROI).

A digital dispensary that balances compliance with speed.

ACRE Pharmacy’s ecommerce business is built on Commerce Cloud and Experience Cloud. All online transactions, orders, and invoices are handled by the platform, which is connected to the website and has a custom digital dispensary built on top.

When a clinic or pharmacy needs to write a prescription, they can do it in just one sitting by logging into the online portal. They fill in the patient’s details, select the product from a list that only shows items they’re eligible to order, and add any directions. On submission, the system generates a secure four-digit SMS PIN. When this has been entered, a pharmacist checks the order and can dispense the prescription in just one click.

This used to take around 10 minutes, but with Salesforce, each order is ready to dispense in just two. That means — unlike average pharmacies, which process up to 7,000 items per month — ACRE Pharmacy can handle 33,000 items per month with just two pharmacists. Every order is fully traceable, compliant with industry regulations, and follows all relevant guidance around patient safety. The system also automates reports for the finance team to reconcile and process every month. In the future, ACRE Pharmacy will use Salesforce Payments to give customers even more ways to pay.

Keeping ACRE Pharmacy front-of-mind with relevant, regular communications.

ACRE Pharmacy started using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to build stronger B2B relationships, and as its business pivoted to become more consumer-like, it rolled out the full Marketing Cloud suite. This captures more data to hyper-personalize marketing campaigns. For example, a customer’s past purchases, website browsing behavior, and interests are used to tailor more relevant communications. The team uses trigger-based journeys. If a customer has an abandoned cart, they can remind them to check out, keeping ACRE Pharmacy front-of-mind. This is particularly crucial in the fast-paced, high-demand pharmaceutical sector. The company also uses customer order patterns to check if a customer hasn’t made their regular purchase on time, or to up- and cross-sell other relevant products that complement past purchases. And with comprehensive dashboards providing real-time visibility, the team can track the impact of marketing campaigns. This fresh insight reveals that marketing activity contributes up to 40% of revenue per month, driven by high-performing email metrics like a 52.7% open rate and a 4.7% click-through rate.

Elevating the customer experience with AI agents.

ACRE Pharmacy is embracing Agentforce to streamline customer interactions and automate workflows, with its first AI agent providing customer support on the website. It offers help with ordering, answers product questions, and can provide personalized information such as how many regulated products a customer can order, updates on pending orders and deliveries, outstanding invoices, and insurance status. The company turned its attention to the partner experience. Partner manufacturers send sales reps to clinics and pharmacies and make sales agreements, which are fulfilled by ACRE Pharmacy. This setup means manufacturers often have no way of tracking sales against commitments, so ACRE Pharmacy introduced a custom portal and AI agent to give them access to sales data. They are able to choose whether to visualize insights in Tableau graphs or ask the agent for answers. The next AI agent in the pipeline will be an ordering assistant helping with the prescription journey. It will be able to automatically populate some fields on the order form, add order to basket, help with the checkout process, and reduce the number of clicks.

Turning onboarding from a chore into a competitive advantage.

When a new lead comes in from ACRE Pharmacy’s website, it’s qualified and onboarded in Salesforce. Customers submit a form with all the information needed so a rep can confirm their identity and eligibility to order regulated products. This takes just five minutes, compared to an industry average of 48 hours — meaning that customers can sign up for an account at 3pm and have products delivered by 10am the next working day. As the pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated, and further aesthetics regulations will come into force in the coming years, ACRE needed to set up checks and controls within its system. The company used 25 custom objects to create a quality management system on Salesforce, saving hundreds of thousands of pounds by building it in-house. This is only accessible to verified users on the quality team or specially trained members of the sales team.

Customers need to be qualified every 12 months to ensure they’re still eligible to order regulated products. At other companies, this is usually done manually with a team of up to 15 people, but ACRE Pharmacy’s automated system is run by a small team of three. It’s also highly scalable, supporting 120% company growth in one financial year without drastically increasing headcount.

Better visibility into sales supports smarter decision-making.

Opportunities are tracked in Sales Cloud. The team can view the pipeline and predict which products will be ordered each month. They also use Tableau dashboards to visualize performance metrics by territory, for example, and can use filters to query the data. This helps them to nurture the right relationships at the right time and have relevant conversations. They can also visualize which products a customer is buying and surface any missed opportunities for cross-selling. Management dashboards are also used to show directors what’s driving growth and revenue, which revenue streams are getting the best results, and how many active accounts there are — all from one convenient place.

Multi-channel support that customers can trust in.

ACRE Pharmacy has a small team of four handling up to 200 inquiries per day. Cases automatically route to Service Cloud from a variety of integrated channels, including social media, phone, and email. Every case is tracked from a central console, which automatically pulls metrics into a KPI dashboard. This helps to meet SLAs, such as case resolution times, and helped secure a Trustpilot score of 4.9 out of 5.

Salesforce comes with great out-of-the-box functionality and is easy to customize. It acts as a single source of truth, lifting the lid on customers’ wants, needs, and order history and making these insights actionable. And it does this while giving ACRE Pharmacy one platform that powers the entire customer experience. ACRE Pharmacy also benefits from Salesforce’s commitment to continuous innovation and the regular updates to products and features that help it stay ahead of its competitors.

• 120% growth in revenue in one financial year
• 4.9 Trustpilot score for customer service
• 33,000 orders processed every month / 4.5x more monthly orders than industry average
• 5-minute onboarding compared to 48-hour industry average