The Ask

Evolve CVS.com/shop to meet and exceed competitive online shopping experiences, integrating the full offering CVS’ connected consumer services

Making sense of CVS’ vast retail catalog & ecosystem

Traditional/brick-and-mortar (B&M) retailers often create overly complex relationships with their customer-base, often a result to try to add value to their brand and value in the face of streamlined and elegant shopping experiences offered by digital retailers. CVS’ retail experience walks many boundaries: being the local corner store; the local pharmacy; and, with recent transformations, transitioning to being your local walk-in clinic and on-demand health care provider that so happens to offer everyday consumer goods.

Add to the above:

• Complex and trained behaviors by CVS faithful, such as coupon clipping and a tiered loyalty program;
• An aggressive need to upscale retail services necessitated by the pandemic, such as in-store pickup;
• That not all store services currently are not seamlessly integrated in one online experience; and,
• The fact that CVS prices are simply, more expensive than competing retailers

and you have an incredibly complex puzzle to solve for the next generation online shopping experience.

Workshopping with the clients

Early on in our discovery process, we held a two-day long virtual workshop with our managing stakeholders to detail mission-critical use cases. Our primary charge was to focus exclusively on the online retailer experience, and find a way make it feel connected to each shopper’s local/familiar CVS location.

Ultimately, through workshopping with the client team, we defined several distinct user-types and journeys that we believe offered CVS’ largest white-space opportunities against it’s competitors, these white spaces existed explicitly because of CVS’ goal to vastly improve it’s e-commerce brand and experience, something it’s direct competitors (e.g. Rite-Aid, Walgreens) consistently fail at.

Core challenges

Further evaluating their business roadmap, dev-stack and competitive sets, we prioritized necessary features and efforts to help them exceed expectations in their consumer’s eyes. Ideally, these improvements would set the stage to naturally scale and unify their enterprise, CVS Health’s brand experience over a much longer term than this project allowed:

Director’s Notes

Winning with our clients

One of the first major challenges we had with our CVS clients was instilling an appreciation for UX within the organization the creative process. Early on, we heard comments such as “I don’t want to see wireframes” and “I only want to see pictures”.

It was clear we weren’t going to be able to make any progress without grounding our decisions in UX. We still wireframed, but presented everything in creative, coordinating our leads to speak in concert to cover both ends of our decisions. Ultimately, it allowed us to catch up on timing on the project from being nearly 5 weeks behind.

Growing the account

In the end, our CVS.com/shop work was so successful that Razorfish was established as CVS’s digital agency of record (AOR). Subsequently, in the next 16 months, we tackled 8 additional enterprise-level digital projects.