Reinventing Enterprise & Consumer Experiences

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IT'S A BIG PILL TO SWALLOW

Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal was a comprehensive program to transform all pharmacy operations, technologies, and customer interactions to support new and innovative ways of serving current and future customer needs.

Facing increased pharmacy competition, as well as growth opportunities with the acquisition of 1,900 Rite Aid stores, Walgreens needed to quickly address both the pharmacy operation and customer pain points.

With an ambitious timeline of approximately one year to launch all deliverables, and 12 billion annual prescription experiences on the line, it was essential for work to be completed at a fast pace — with no room for errors.

As Principal UX Architect for the project, I was contracted to use my expertise to rapidly build a team, guide product design, usability and research, to produce high-quality consumer and enterprise-level deliverables on time and within budget.

A spoon full of sugar helps the data go down.

Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal project re-examined every aspect of the pharmacy business: distributor relationships, inventory tracking and control, third-party payer management, interfacing with prescribers, prescription fulfillment, regulatory compliance, government program administration, and customer interactions and relationships.

A complete digital pharmacy transformation was designed and built for Walgreens, including establishing UX guidelines and best practices to unify the vision for filling millions of prescriptions daily.

THE CHALLENGE

INTEGRATE, AUTOMATE & OPTIMIZE SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS FOR MILLIONS OF DAILY PRESCRIPTIONS — AND KEEP CUSTOMERS HAPPY

Pharmacy Renewal was a complete end-to-end transformation of every aspect of Walgreens' pharmacy business — optimizing business processes, technical infrastructure, physical pharmacy attributes, and human capital, to provide a superior level of customer service.

MY ROLE & LEADERSHIP

IMPROVE BUSINESS PROCESSES TO ELEVATE IN-STORE & DIGITAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

My role as Principal User Experience Architect was to set the UX strategy, build and manage a team, align with internal stakeholders to prioritize scheduling and resource allocation, and drive world-class product creation within a tight timeline.

As a hands-on leader, I developed and built customer touchpoints for Pharmacy Renewal by interfacing with managers at all levels to execute initiatives throughout the product life cycle, implementing user research and testing to ensure products and services exceeded expectations, and collecting and using data to improve the customer experience and business processes.

My responsibilities included hiring, mentoring, and leading a large team to research, design and execute the product vision. My activities included meeting with executive stakeholders to review design research and progress toward achieving goals, driving decisions to remove roadblocks or barriers, and setting the vision for new ideas and innovations that benefited the program.

There were three primary aspects to my role in the Pharmacy Renewal program.

  1. I worked with stakeholders to define high-level vision, strategy, and roadmaps for the program.
  2. I used research data and industry knowledge to identify new opportunities that helped the program achieve its goals.
  3. I provided tactical guidance and input for the execution of the strategy.

My significant contributions included:

  • Owning processes and methodologies to unify the vision for millions of daily prescription experiences.
  • Defining detailed product and customer experience requirements and creating UX design standards for best-in-class digital experiences to serve pharmacy customers.
  • Conceptualizing new product innovations and UX strategy to meet growing customer needs and expectations.
  • Directing development of multiple products, ensuring discovery/design best practices were followed.
  • Supporting recruiting efforts, hiring and managing UX designers and researchers.
  • Building a UX team and a culture where designers and researchers could grow in their careers and feel a strong sense of product ownership.
  • Fostering a strong, collaborative UX practice within Walgreens and increasing the organizational maturity of the function.
  • Extending Walgreens' brand identity into all products without compromising usability.

STRATEGY & INSIGHTS

OPPORTUNITIES TO DIFFERENTIATE PRODUCT & SERVICE OFFERINGS

As part of a comprehensive Comparative Analysis for Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal, I analyzed competing pharmacy service providers relative to customer perception. My analysis uncovered many opportunities to differentiate product and service offerings.

To uncover important qualitative insights for Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal, I conducted personal interviews with pharmacy customers, pharmacy managers, store managers, pharmacists, technicians, and clinical services providers.

I observed Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal target users (pharmacists and technicians) performing everyday activities in the context of the use environment (in a pharmacy) to uncover routine behavioral data that might not surface in interviews.

The results of journey mapping workshops that I led defined the current state of the customer journey and surfaced customer pain points and opportunities for improvement and optimization.

I refined the results of the journey mapping workshops and presented them in a form which clearly illustrated customer touchpoints to deliver a better experience into the future.

RESULTS

LOWER OPERATIONAL COSTS + 12 BILLION BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES = MEASURABLE ROI

The customer health experiences designed for Walgreens' digital pharmacy transformation established UX guidelines and best practices for 12 billion annual prescription experiences.

The new product design for consumer and enterprise-level deliverables, including a customer-facing mobile app and backend desktop and web solutions, reduced wait times and operational costs, and provided innovative features that delighted employees and customers.

The holistic solution for Pharmacy Renewal included not only design for the customer app, but also significant backend components, like point-of-sale system modifications and the addition of QR code scanners.

The new customer-facing mobile app was designed to empower patients with choices on how they manage prescriptions, and included special features to meet the needs of customers aged 55+, which increased app usage of that group to more than twice the industry average.

The new, easy-to-use app was instantly popular with users. It reached 50 million downloads within the first year and a 5-star customer rating in the U.S. Apple app store.

BUSINESS RESULTS

  • Research & customer journey maps led to changes that increased pharmacy sales 14% in 3 months
  • Simple, time-saving customer processes achieved a new 20% digital prescription refill benchmark
  • Operational costs & customer wait times were significantly decreased