Students developed the Yliopiston Apteekki online shop and loyalty programme

Yliopiston Apteekki is Finland's largest pharmacy company, serving Finns in its 17 pharmacies and online shop ya.fi. The customer experience is at the centre of Yliopiston Apteekki operations, and the company's customer experience has also been awarded nationally. 

- We strongly invest in how we meet our clients online and physically in our pharmacies so that we have as good and uniform experience as possible regardless of the service channel, says E-Commerce Manager Tiia Turunen, they are responsible for the development of the Yliopiston Apteekki online store.

The customer experience was also at the centre of the joint service design project of Yliopiston Apteekki and Laurea, which was carried out during the autumn term. Yliopiston Apteekki is one of Laurea's key partners.

In the Service Design study unit project, student teams were able to respond to two development challenges of Yliopiston Apteekki. The first focus of the development work was customer engagement and loyalty, while the second focused on facilitating the use of prescription services in the Yliopiston Apteekki online shop. 

- We chose certain themes as assignments which we had already identified as development targets, Tiia Turunen from Yliopiston Apteekki summarises the project objectives.   

Service design becomes concrete in a real-life assignment

The Service Design study unit brought together students from Laurea's English-language education. In the assignment, the student teams were able to utilise the service design process and methods they had learned and created their own development proposals for the challenges presented by Yliopiston Apteekki. 

- This was a very interesting project. It was wonderful to be able to implement a real-life service design project for an actual customer. In this way, service design was opened up in a completely different way if you compare it to studying it only in theory, business students Angelika Koski and Suvi Besic say.

Koski and Besic together with their team developed the Yliopiston Apteekki online shop's customer process.

Although everyone is familiar with visiting pharmacies, the students had to understand the special features of the pharmacy sector in this project. Laws and regulations guide the activities closely and marketing that encourages the use of medicines is not permitted. 

- This was a challenging project; the sector was previously unknown to us. At the same time, however, this was a very educational project, and it was nice to work on the topic, says Juha Hoffrén and Pessi Nurmi, Business Information Technology students whose team aimed at developing the customer experience in the Yliopiston Apteekki loyalty programme. 

Collecting data on customer understanding through interviews played an important role in the progress of the project. For example, development targets, some of which were surprising for the students, were highlighted in the interviews, 

- Our team focused on developing e-commerce from the perspective of the elderly. In the interviews, we were surprised by how important the image of the prescription medicine is, especially when the name of the medicine is difficult to remember, says Angelika Koski.

Students' ideas to support development work

At the end of the study unit, the student teams presented their development ideas to the Yliopiston Apteekki representatives. In addition to Tiia Turunen, who is responsible for developing the online shop, the students' presentations were also heard by Kati Räihä, Customer Loyalty Manager, and Katariina Lehtinen, Manager of Pharmaceutical Information Services -unit of Yliopiston Apteekki. The customers were satisfied with the students' work and how well the topics had been addressed. 

- The most valuable aspect was the extent to which the students had identified the same development targets that we have considered ourselves. This confirms that we are on the right track in our development work, Turunen says. 

However, many of the things used in online shops in other sectors that Yliopiston Apteekki could also utilise online were highlighted in the students' work. The students had identified development areas related to, for example, payment, deliveries or customer service chat. 

- We’ll certainly pick up things from the students' presentations to support our own development work. I’m convinced that many of the ideas presented by the students will eventually see the light of day; so many of the student's ideas were good, Tiia Turunen concludes.

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