Everyone’s local drug store, CVS is one of the most recognized health, pharmacy and retail brands in the United States. With nearly $1 billion in online sales in 2022, it’s not a minor player in the e-commerce space, either.
In 2022, Razorfish became CVS’ digital agency-of-record. Our first major project was to stand up a best-in-class e-commerce destination that integrated seamlessly with CVS’ loyal shoppers’ lives, capturing and converting traffic from major local and online retail competitors.
Deliveries
Product and experience research
User Journeys
Product & experience strategy
Responsive web e-commerce
Client
CVS Health & Pharmacy
Area
E-commerce Responsive Web Sites
My Role
ECD, Experience Design (SVP)
Duration:
18 months: 2022 – 2023 (Total Engagement)
CVS’ shopper and retail profile
CVS has a shopper-base of over 90 million Americans, and their online store welcomes more than 135 million visits per month.
60 Million Women Shoppers
The vast majority, 2/3rds, of CVS’ shoppers are women, and that share goes up when it comes to CVS’ loyalty programs.
Health + Wellness Brand
Their shoppers view CVS as more than just the corner store and more than just a pharmacy.
Health, wellness and beauty products account for 69% of CVS’ retail sales revenue.
Coupon Clippers + Two Loyalty Programs
CVS is one of the only store brands that has a significant portion of shoppers who coupon-clip.
Additionally, the brand has two loyalty programs, one free and one paid.
10 categories, 15,000 products
CVS’ product selection is large for a retailer with a relatively small store footprint.
In addition to offering name-brands, CVS also offers competing products via its first-party label.
79.8 million ft2 of Retail Space
While a CVS store isn’t as large as say, a Target or Walmart, they have 10,000 locations, all activated as warehouses for online order fulfillment.
COVID: Fulfillment Impacts
The COVID pandemic forced CVS to hastily add new fulfillment methods, such as curbside and courier delivery services.
Our UX would need to (more) seamlessly weave these services into new site experience.
A challenging client…
Bidding for the initial scope of work, the CVS pitch team shared hesitations about taking the retailer and health services provider on a client. Within the agency community, CVS had earned the notorious reputation of being very difficult to work with. As a client they had been spectacularly dropped by a number of well respected and highly effective agencies.
With an e-commerce effort that inevitably would impact every aspect of the organization, we knew many executive eyes would be focused on our efforts. If we won the pitch, we’d need to do some heavy preparation and contingency planning — as the agency team — managing a client where in-house executive stakeholders championed competing, often incompatible visions.
…Manifest
We planned rigorously with our our day-to-day client stakeholders, agreeing to pursue a typical review and approval cycle: UX artefacts > Visual design
The review cycle was initially built to have 2 rounds of review and approval by our day-to-day stakeholders prior to presenting to CVS’ executive review committee consisting of their Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Design Officer and the Head of Product Management — 3 company leaders who very rarely shared the same space.
Our first executive review quickly went off the rails, forcing a work-stoppage and requiring several frustrating debriefs for the agency team.
“I don’t want to see wireframes. Show me pictures.”
Norman d.G., Chief Marketing Officer
While we anticipated difficulties managing this client, we assumed that CVS, as a company that implemented design thinking and solutioning internally (they have an internal creative agency, called HeartHaus), would be familiar with a waterfall design process.
Not only were we informed that UX artefacts were not to be shown during review, we also learned our executives had not aligned their respective goals.
How we solved with the client team
By this point, our team had collectively committed hundreds of hours of work to arrive at the executive review, only for the work to fall flat. Questions swirled about potentially having to re-do UX that had been hard negotiated, a possible momentum killer.
Revisiting a recording of the executive review, we realized that feedback was almost exclusively focused on presentation and not our thinking. Our UX was solid and well informed. Ultimately, we realized that we needed to lead with visual design when CVS executives were in the room.
Discipline leaders took further steps. We approached CVS’ Chief Design Officer to understand what role, if any, UX played in the organization.
Keeping UX reviews to check-ins with day-to-day stakeholders, and, when presenting to executives, we’d advocate for UX through the creative. Likewise, our day-to-day clients and CCO would step up and re-enforce design decisions presented during executive sessions.
Nearly three weeks after the initial review, we arrived once again at executive review ready to present our work.
“Excellent work! I really appreciated your efforts to meet my limitations. No one we’ve ever worked with has ever taken the time to demystify user experience the way you have. Thank you.”
