Driving sales and loyalty for eye care professionals
Alcon saw an opportunity to completely change how customers purchase contact lenses. As one of the world’s largest contact lens manufacturers, they enjoyed the unique position to enable eye care professionals to regain control of the contact lens ordering process.
With over 70 years in business, Alcon is a leading international eye care company, with products ranging from eye care devices to contact lenses, as well as lens care. Many patients around the world, in over 140 countries, rely on Alcon for their innovative vision care technology and related products.
After writing a prescription, Alcon’s current commerce model did not include the Eyecare Professional in the contact lens ordering process. Due to a plethora of online contact lens ordering outlets, consumers traditionally leave their appointment without ordering contact lenses in the office. Not only is this a disruption and potential lag in the patient’s ordering process, it also was losing revenue for the eye care professional that could have sold them the lenses. Alcon saw a way for eye care professionals to regain control of the ordering process through the development of a B2B-B2C ecommerce platform.
Alcon realized their need for a digital platform that would allow eye care professionals to create a new connection with their patients, as well as providing them a platform to seamlessly order their lenses before leaving their office. This platform would allow patients to order their contact lenses through a kiosk in the office and re-order anywhere from the patient’s mobile device. The patient will be notified when it’s time to reorder their lenses and the simple process will help ensure there isn’t a gap in ordering.
The extreme convenience of having their eye care professional place their initial order, coupled with relationship loyalty, could increase both eye care professionals’ profits and Alcon’s overall contact lens market share. This new, innovative platform required a strategic partner with long term vision, which Alcon found in Bottle Rocket.
Alcon chose Bottle Rocket as a partner, to create a world-class ordering portal that simply and easily connects eye care professionals and consumers for convenient contact lens ordering. This platform was tested among a pilot group of over 150 eye care professionals. Alcon has prepared for a frictionless large-scale launch through product evolution, platform updates and extensive QA. Bottle Rocket’s product strategy and go-to-market consultation was a winning partnership for Alcon. Additionally, Bottle Rocket’s industry-leading Quality Assurance (QA) group acted as the lead quality analysts on the engagement and leveraged both manual and automated testing procedures to ensure a successful, bug-free launch. Via the Bottle Rocket QA automation lab and team, we were able to automate over 60 tests twice a day covering over 2,000 website touchpoints, including buttons, field adds and beyond. QA automation was able to act as mini-regression tests to consistently look for and locate hot spots, defect clustering, and more, providing specific direction to our manual QA testers for more in-depth testing.
This digital solution for Alcon disrupts the current commerce model allowing the patient to order their contact lenses in the eye care professional’s office while paying for their office visit or from their mobile device while still staying connected to their eye care professional. This model will create a whole new loyalty and commerce channel for eye care professionals and a newfound convenience for customers.
