CVS has a reputation for consistency and value throughout its history, achieving worldwide success through its straightforward drugstore and pharmacy business model. Today, CVS is investing heavily in Digital Transformation. According to this interview with Brian Tilzer, SVP and CDO, CVS Health, data was historically used to justify projects. But now, “the bigger idea is to use data to personalize experiences.”
This pharmacy retailer faced the challenge of the App Stores when they released their iOS app. It is important for apps to be useful to customers, with an intuitive UI. Otherwise, the expansion into the smartphone and app market could hurt the brand. So how did CVS do? We decided to find out by using the Signals platform to conduct a data analysis on the CVS app. We took a deep dive into the customer reviews to see how well customers viewed its intro.
We used Signals’ built-in iOS App Store data connector to data-mine more than 5000 customer reviews of the CVS mobile app. (See related blog post: Data Connectors for Customer Analysis.) Customer reviews contained both the structured data (e.g. ranking by the number of stars) and unstructured data (the free-form text). The analytics results were largely positive. Our sentiment indicator below registered a high app rating:
That’s a good sign for CVS, showing that the textual data itself in the reviews corresponds with the high star rating that CVS has received. We can do so much more with the Signals platform, however.
A Truly Comprehensive Experience
One reason why some apps from large companies fail is that they fail to grant the full user experience demanded by the customer base. Either they are not compatible with some mobile-specific features or they lack certain essential functions of communicating properly with the business. Fortunately, CVS was successful in avoiding this problem:
The picture above is the Category Overview widget in Signals. This widget divides all the reviews into categories based on the substance of their keywords, ranked by frequency, and sentiment (blue is positive). We can clearly tell from this picture that there are no negative topics that app users really want to talk about (these would have appeared in red). The data shows that the CVS app has many noteworthy features and that users are praising the CVS app across multiple fronts. This is a good thing; it means that the CVS app’s slogan of being a comprehensive service proves true.
Improvement Opportunity
Everything seems perfect with the CVS app, right? Well, not exactly perfect. There is one area that can stand to be improved. Using Signals, we were able to find a function in the app that has some customers frustrated. Moreover, we didn’t need to manually scan all 5,000 reviews to find it. Signals pointed it out.
Shown above, top right, is Signals’ Buzzword widget, which generates a word cloud of the most popular search terms in the dataset. The top bigram is “Extra Care” — the subtitle of the app — but equally prominent is “Apple Pay”. Why is that? Examining the reviews featuring “Apple Pay” (and “Accept Apple” on the far right), we can see that customers are annoyed that the CVS app lacks compatibility with Passbook and Apple Pay, which distracts from the full enjoyment of this app for many customers. This is a useful find that CVS may want to address.
Conclusion
Using Signals, we were able to review the voice of the customer on the CVS app, and found largely positive results. Furthermore, we were able to go into nuanced detail about a particular complaint on Apple Pay, which wouldn’t have been picked up nearly as quickly in a manual scan.
Signals takes your structured and unstructured datasets and generates reliable, effective business insights in minutes. You can upload your own data, or use one of our built-in data connectors to popular websites like the App Store.
If you would like more information, or want to try Signals for yourself, please contact us at clientsupport@stratifyd.com. We would love to work with you!
