5 years ago
Merial
Stuart Cripps-Schnoor
WHO ARE MERIAL?
Merial is a world-leading, innovation-driven animal health company, providing a comprehensive range of products to enhance the health, well-being and performance of a wide range of animals. Merial employs approximately 6,000 people and operates in more than 150 countries worldwide.
WHAT WE DID
One of the biggest challenges for Merial is market differentiation and a need to provide exceptional added value services to clients. Practices’ often struggle to market effiective due to lack of budget, resource and knowledge.
Our primary objective has been to deliver a best in class solution to support Merial’s veterinary clients in all aspects of marketing and communications. The starting point was to develop a centralised cloud based platform “Merial Nexus” that would enable us to register, manage and support the practices effectively. Each user gains access to a number of different services/resources based on their grouping. Certain services/resources are provided free of charge whilst others can be purchased using a quarterly budget allocated by Merial based on their spend.
The services include:
Printed stationery – An intuitive platform allowing practices’ the ability to design and print any marketing/comms collateral. This is extended by an efficient stocking and fulfilment solution.
SMS – Send text messages to remind clients when vaccinations and appointments are due.
Digital Asset Management – access to images, videos, technical documents, social media collateral and more.
CPD – Driving compliance and providing training is essential in the pharmaceutical industry. This online tool allows users to register, complete courses and build their CPD profile.
Webinars – Communication is key and providing a centralised webinar function allows Merial to provide insightful updates and broadcasts to platform users. These are recorded and used as assets and CPD courses to enhance learning opportunities.
The second phase to the project was driven by the need for accurate and automated reporting. Merial had two major challenges.
- How to accurately calculate the rebates that should be paid to a practice based on yearly sales
- How to demonstrate the added value being provided to clients?
We built an application as an extension of the Merial Nexus platform. This enabled us to combine customer, sales, calculations and added value data from the Nexus platform. Through automated routines and complex logic we were able to deliver accurate reports for each practice detailing their rebates and added value on a quarterly basis. Actively tracking progression and showing increases has allowed Merial to use the reports as a valuable tool for retaining and winning business.
A comprehensive support service has been wrapped around the entire process to ensure that Merial and the practices gain access to expert advice and support whenever required.
Our primary objective has been to deliver a best in class solution to support Merial’s veterinary clients in all aspects of marketing and communications
THE BENEFITS
- Creation of captive customer base that can be communicated to
- Improved data capture of each customer profile
- Tracked usage of services, assets and interactions
- Complete budget control and visibility of spend
- A dramatic reduction in labour to process rebate statements and payments
- 360-degree visibility on all marketing activities
- Valuable tools to retain and win business
THE STATS
- 9,967 customers
- Over 1,500 documents designed and fulfilled in the last 12 months
- Over 250,000 SMS messages delivered in the last 12 months
- 8,364 documents downloaded in 2016
- 654 course completions in 2016
THE TECHNICAL BIT
The solution has been built around our proprietary platform, Brand iQ. A bespoke platform written using the Laravel PHP framework for its excellence in speed and security. The platform is hosted using a high availability virtualised solution (Digital Ocean) and benefits from robust daily backups to the Amazon cloud (AWS) with a 1-hour disaster recovery solution in place.
In order to maintain scalability and versatility numerous APIs were developed to enable seamless data interchange between Merial systems and integration with our reporting platform.
Securely managing user data is essential. The platform uses AES-256 level encryption and conforms to ISO27001 for data security.
