Walgreens’ mobile app gets 5-star ranking from users

The Walgreens mobile app recently hit a milestone, earning a five-star rating in Apple’s App Store. The Deerfield, Ill.-based company said that the app’s three most popular features among users are prescription refill (including refill-by-scan), photo print ordering and paperless coupons.

Walgreens has built the app out in recent years to offer more than its most popular features. It offers users a store locator, a pill reminder feature and pharmacy chat to ask questions of their pharmacists. It also lets patients upload prescription insurance card information for the pharmacy, schedule appointments at its healthcare clinics and start a live doctor consultation through an integration with telehealth provider MDLive.

The company in June announced that the app was seeing particular interest among older users, with 27% of its users being ages 55 years and older — a group that makes up only about 9% of smartphone ownership. The mobile pharmacy tools, in particular, draw 37% of their user base from those ages 55 years and older.

“One of the things we repeatedly hear is that customers really value their connections with individual pharmacists and staff,” Walgreens divisional VP loyalty Mindy Heintskill said in June. “We wanted to replicate that connection digitally, so customers can get a high-value, personalized experience even when they can’t make it into a store.”

Other features that the company said help bring the store to patients is the ability to access detailed information about in-store products, check store inventory and read user reviews. In addition to photo print ordering — which Walgreens said makes up a large share of its photo processing business — the app also allows users to create custom cards for such occasions as birthdays and holidays.