CVS Health and Microsoft announced a new strategic alliance focused on developing innovative solutions to help consumers improve their health, while empowering over 300,000 CVS Health employees – including frontline workers – with tools to better serve more than 100 million people.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations in every industry – health care in particular – have grappled with the need to adapt quickly. According to an Economist Intelligence Unit study commissioned by Microsoft, organizations have accelerated transformation initiatives and have begun to rely more heavily on digital tools. From creating hybrid environments to help employees work from home virtually, to deploying new applications to better support frontline workers, digital transformation has become a fundamental necessity for business resilience, accelerating growth, and driving efficiencies.
“We are rapidly transforming into a consumer-centric, integrated health solutions company, taking a digital-first, technology forward approach to all that we do,” said Roshan Navagamuwa, Chief Information Officer, CVS Health. “Business services at this scale require a new level of partnership. Our collaboration with Microsoft will accelerate this work and empower our employees to provide quality care that is more personal and affordable.”
Customized Care
The collaboration with Microsoft will help CVS Health accelerate a data-driven, personalized customer experience, while complying with the company’s patient privacy and confidentiality policies. By combining information from different areas across the company with high agility, CVS Health will enhance its omnichannel pharmacy capabilities and deliver customized health recommendations when and where consumers need them. CVS Health will also scale up retail loyalty and personalization programs that use advanced Machine Learning models running on the cloud computing service Azure.
In addition to creating a more personalized and seamless experience for consumers, data science will also be used to improve access to care and health outcomes. The ability to create a simple, easy-to-use patient experience has been critical to CVS Health’s role in the national COVID-19 vaccination effort, delivering insights and recommendations to ensure equitable and efficient administration of approximately 43 million vaccines.
Enabling Frontline Workers
Throughout the pandemic, CVS Health retail employees have continued to support their communities by staying focused on their day-to-day responsibilities. Through the use of Microsoft Teams and Office products, CVS Health will be more agile, enabling retail employees to more easily consume key information needed to answer common questions and solve customer needs faster.
Digitalizing Operations
CVS Health currently leverages Azure cognitive services like Computer Vision and Text Analytics for Health that automate tasks. In Specialty Pharmacy, for example, CVS Health has digitized intake using these services – including the 40 percent of prescriptions that arrive as paper or fax – helping technicians fill prescriptions, faster and easier than previous methods. Microsoft will continue to expand and partner with CVS Health to reimagine and simplify processes, as part of CVS Health’s technology-driven digitalization program.
Expanding Cloud Services
CVS Health selected Microsoft as a preferred cloud provider for applications based on a successful history of engineering and co-innovation. As a strategic platform, Azure will play a key role in CVS Health’s acceleration of its digital transformation by expanding the company’s already formidable multi-cloud presence to over 1,500 new and existing business applications in Azure cloud.
Innovative Solutions
Microsoft and CVS Health will also explore innovative technology solutions that will support consumers, employees, and ecosystem partners. Microsoft HoloLens, Dynamics 365 Guides, and Remote Assist can simplify complex procedures with intuitive tools to help support CVS Health employees. Microsoft Azure AI and cognitive capabilities can also extend to automate administrative and predictive processes and reduce waste through co-innovation with CVS Health’s deep community presence and health care expertise.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring, sentiment analysis, etc. Currently, Microsoft operates in 190 countries and is made up of more than 220,000 employees worldwide.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service software provider, offering robust CRM and automation solutions. Some of its products include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, Content Hub, Commerce Hub, Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software. Guided by its inbound methodology, HubSpot enables companies to prioritise innovation and customer success.
Monday.com is a project management software company, offering a cloud-based platform that enables businesses 
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks is a global AI-powered business software provider. Its tech stack includes a scalable and comprehensive suite for IT, customer support, sales, and marketing teams, ensuring value for immediate business impact. Its product portfolio includes Customer Service Suite, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshcaller, Freshsuccess, and Freshservice. Freshservice for Business Teams has helped several global organisations to enhance their operational efficiency.
Talkdesk offers an innovative AI-powered customer-centric tech stack to its global partners. The company provides generative AI integrations, delivering industry-specific solutions to its customers. Talkdesk CX Cloud and Industry Experience Clouds utilise modern machine learning and language models to enhance contact centre efficiency and client satisfaction.
The company offers comprehensive cloud-based solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gaming Consoles, Microsoft Advertising, Copilot, among other things, to help organisations offer enhanced CX and ROI. Its generative-AI-powered speech and voice recognition solutions,such as Cortana and Azure Speech Services empowers developers to build intelligent applications.
IBM is a global hybrid cloud and AI-powered 
Uniphore is an enterprise-class, AI-native company that was incubated in 2008. Its enterprise-class multimodal AI and data platform unifies all elements of voice, video, text and data by leveraging Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI and workflow automation. Some of its products include U-Self Serve, U-Assist, U-Capture, and U-Analyze. Its Q for Sale is a conversational intelligence software that guides revenue teams with AI-powered insights, offering clarity on how to effectively keep prospects engaged.
Google Cloud accelerates every organisation’s ability to digitally transform its business. Its enterprise-grade solutions leverage modern technology to solve the most criticial business problems 
8×8 offers out-of-the-box contact centre solutions, assisting all-size businesses to efficiently meet customer needs and preferences. It offers custom CRM integrations support and integrates effortlessly with third-party CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and more. Offering global support in all time zones & development teams in 5 continents, its patented geo-routing solution ensures consistent voice quality.
Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company for all customer-focused functions. With advanced AI, Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform lets organisations offer human experiences to every customer, every time, across any modern channel.
Upland offers a comprehensive suite of contact centre and customer service solutions with products including InGenius, Panviva, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers. InGenius enables organisations to connect their existing phone system with CRM, further enhancing agent productivity. Panviva provides compliant and omnichannel capabilities for highly regulated industries. Whereas, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers are its AI-powered solutions, 
Zoho Social, a part of Zoho’s suite of 50+ products, is a comprehensive social media management platform for businesses and agencies. The Zoho Social dashboard includes a robust set of features, such as Publishing Calendar, Bulk Scheduler, and Approval Management to offer businesses all the essential social media publishing tools. Its monitoring tools help enterprises track and respond to relevant social conversations.
Hootsuite, headquartered in Vancouver, is a social media management platform that streamlines the process of managing multiple social media accounts. Some of its core offerings include social media content planning and publishing, audience engagement tools, analytics and social advertising. Its easy-to-integrate capabilities help marketing teams to schedule and publish social media posts efficiently.
Brandwatch enables businesses to build and scale the optimal strategy for their clients with intuitive, use-case-focused tools that are easy and quick to master. Bringing together consumer intelligence and social media management, the company helps its users react to the trends that matter, collaborate on data-driven content, shield the brand from threats and manage all the social media channels at scale.
Zoho Corporation offers innovative and tailored software to help leaders grow their business. Zoho’s 55+ products aid sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance, and recruitment requirements. Its customer analytics capabilities come with a conversational feature, Ask Zia. It enables users to ask questions and get insights in the form of reports and widgets in real-time.
Salesforce-owned Tableau is an AI-powered analytics and business intelligence platform, offering the breadth and depth of capabilities that serve the requirements of global enterprises in a seamless, integrated experience. Marketers can utilise generative AI models, AI-powered predictions, natural language querying, and recommendationsons.
Fullstory is a behavioural data platform, helping C-suite leaders make informed decisions by injecting digital behavioural data into its analytics stack. Its patented technology uncovers the power of quality behavioural data at scale, transforming every digital visit into actionable insights. Enterprises can increase funnel conversion and identify their highest-value customers effortlessly.
Contentsquare is a cloud-based digital experience analytics platform, helping brands track billions of digital interactions, and turn those digital 
Amplitude is a product analytics platform, enabling businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform leverages the capabilities of 
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirement for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its platform helps play an essential role in managing different digital content or assets to improve customer happiness. Its easy-to-optimise content gives users appropriate marketing streams, ensuring product awareness.
Started in 2005 in a Sweden-based small town, Norrköping, Voyado offers a customer experience cloud platform that includes a customer loyalty management system. This platform helps businesses design and implement customer loyalty programs, track customer 
TapMango provides a comprehensive, customisable, flexible and feature-rich customer loyalty program. The loyalty tools include an integrated suite of customised consumer-facing technology, easy-to-use merchant tools, and automation algorithms, all aimed at enhancing customer experience. Adaptable to any industry, TapMango’s platform helps merchants compete with larger chains, converting customer one-time purchases into profitable spending habits.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its innovative platform has played an essential role in managing different digital content or assets, to improve customer happiness or satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage.
