Growing a legacy digital pharmacy through improved experience
2 min read
Our client could not compete on price with new competitors and business models.
We relaunched their website with a new headless architecture and a streamlined user experience to give them the growth needed to re-invest in further operational improvements.
CONTEXT
In order to move fast in a changing pharmacy landscape, our client needed quick wins that would also pave the way for continuous improvement of their digital channels. Without the budget to fundamentally change their architecture or operations, our team streamlined the user experience on top of a new headless front end for their legacy system.
If we can make their buying experiences as easy and delightful as consumer ecommerce, can we compete on experience instead of price?
Overall revenue growth for redesigned over-the-counter store
Conversion rates for prescription refills and new customer orders
WHAT WILL BE MEASURED?
OUTCOME
After the launch of the new front end and user experience, conversion rates increased almost 5% overall, including a 73% conversion rate increase in “transfer” prescriptions—i.e., moving a prescription from another pharmacy to ours.
HOW’D WE DO IT
Continuous audit, ruthless prioritization
In order to make the business case for focusing on the front end before bigger tech platform changes, our team ran a usability audit of the existing site. The findings were used to prioritize focus areas based on financial improvements and UX improvements. When compared to improvements made in past client work, this gave us an estimate of the potential ROI for a small, targeted set of improvements.
Once we convinced leadership to get started, we were able to incorporate current analytics into our focus area as we made improvements, including identifying other small wins to increase the ROI. We were continuously prioritizing based on the highest impact and testing to confirm our hypotheses.
Quick wins to fund the journey
The initial phase of improvements showed that we could impact the business meaningfully through simple optimizations. This helped get leadership buy-in for reimagining the entire experience. And the work had paid for itself in the first quarter since the initial improvements.
The first phase also acted as our discovery and research phase. Our team had learned what worked on our site, what was possible on the operations and logistics side of the house, and developed a deeper understanding of our customers’ pharmacy journey.
Future state envisioning and strategic roll out
Our design team laid out a clear, impactful vision for a new user experience. Through collaboration, socialization, and presenting evidence, our design team laid out a clear, impactful vision for a new user experience and got senior stakeholders on-board.
For a legacy company not used to being fast and iterative, this was exciting but also uncomfortable. They had valid concerns about too much change—both for customers and their own operations.
I led the development of a metric framework—combining customer satisfaction and site behavior metrics—that would inform how quickly and broadly we could go from small scale pilot audience to all users experiencing the new site.