Success Stories: Farmacia di Fiducia

An online pharmacy should not function like an ordinary e-commerce. Selling a piece of furniture or clothes is not the same as selling medicine and, for this reason, Farmacia di Fiducia takes its customer care very seriously.

This adaptation to online sales comes from a company with a long history: Farmacia Costa, which began its activity in 1938 and now has a wide range of online products –more than 27,000 items available– accompanied by great customer service.

Doctor Alessandro Melis explains that “the customer service of an online pharmacy shouldn’t differ from the customer service of an offline pharmacy. Our mission has always been to treat our customers online as if they were the ones who show up at the pharmacy every day “.

“The assistance of Farmacia di Fiducia differs above all on listening to the problems of our patients and not on trying to bring home a sale. When we recommend a product to our customers, we always make sure that they don’t have something similar at home that can still help them solve the problem.

Our strenght is that our customers will always find a pharmacist available via chat, while most of our competitors have a non-pharmacist customer service agent on the chat. Professional ethics require us not to “make sales” but to advise according to science and conscience in times of need. Purchases then arrive accordingly “.

Farmacia di Fiducia has not become a success story by focusing its entire strategy to conversion growth, but to giving the best possible customer service. And this is what has impacted their sales: using personalized assistance and displaying the products visually in the chat through Oct8ne’s customer service software.

This tool has been key to its success in the customer service environment: the conversion has reached 21.62% when users have seen products in the chat while talking with the pharmacist.

“The visual support helps us to make the pharmacist’s consulting experience very close to what happens in the offline pharmacy. In this way, the patient/client feels even more at ease and in tune with his trusted pharmacist.

By being able to see the products that our customer is viewing, we can immediately frame the type of customer who is on the other side of the screen and understand which pathological area is for which he needs our advice. This allows to reduce the time of each consultation and be able to serve more people.

The advice in chat is essential in these cases, as in real-time we have the ability to show the customer which product we think best suits his needs. With Oct8ne we now have the possibility to search for the product of our catalog directly in the chat and show the customer the product without having to paste the link as in the past, also gaining from the graphic point of view “.

In fact, the data from Farmacia di Fiducia yield very interesting data: customers who buy at an online pharmacy need assistance and demand it. In the last three months, 58% of users who have entered this e-commerce have proactively requested help via chat.

On the other hand, despite not having a sales-focused trigger strategy because it is important for the company to treat its website as a real pharmacy and rid visitors of pop-ups and newsletter subscriptions – as its competitors do -, They do trigger the chat automatically by offering help when the user has been on the page for a certain amount of time. Something that has also made 42% of users asks their questions after being impacted.

“The conversion rate between orders concluded thanks to the old chat and thanks to Oct8ne is completely different. Oct8ne has more than tripled the chat conversion rate. This is because showing the products in real-time, combined with a good product description and a good image, is practically like showing them personally at the counter in an offline pharmacy ”.

In total, Farmacia di Fiducia has been able to attend to 98% of the requests for help it receives, and after an average of 18 minutes with each client, they show to each user between 2 and 3 products per session until they find the best one for their needs. 

“The experience of our customers with the co-viewer has always been positive. This is thanks to the ease of use even with customers less used to use technology. We chose Oct8ne initially because it allowed us to exchange files with our visitors. This way we could save a lot of time by sending documents like invoices in real-time to customers who couldn’t find them in their email.

Oct8ne also allowed us to receive the documentation that our customers send us for the activation of the subsidized VAT for the purchase of certain health aids.

Last but not least, the customer support we receive from Oct8ne’s team was what convinced us to abandon the old chat for Oct8ne. Having a contact person always available for any doubts about use or any problem was fundamental in choosing Oct8ne as a partner “.