CVS Caremark client customization experience

CVS Caremark

Project Summary

After the successful launch of a new client’s custom CVS Caremark web application, our team’s stakeholders requested that we consider how to scale our solution. 

To do this, I led a research effort to examine the process for the previously launched implementation. Conducting 30+ interviews, I synthesized our findings into several service blueprints, which I used to facilitate discussions around our process pain points, empathize with our client’s and team member’s objectives and needs, and identify opportunities for improvement.

From our discussions, we prioritized the opportunities and collaboratively designed solutions including, new communication channels, a client brand intake form, and a custom in-house content management tool, via a series of workshops I facilitated. 

Outcomes

• Faster implementations, the new process enabled the team to design and deploy a custom CVS Caremark web application in just 3 months, as opposed to the launch of the first client’s application which took over 18 months to deploy.

• Improved client satisfaction, the Content Management System provided transparency into our process and as a result our clients vocalized their appreciation of seamless transaction.

• Reduced resources, the initial team consisted of 10 Experience Designers and Content Strategists. With our new process we were able to scope back the team to just a single Experience Designer for quality control purposes.

Role / Team

Self:

• Planned the study and wrote the research plan

• Conducted stakeholder interviews

• Analyzed data and reported findings to effort stakeholders

• Planned and facilitated workshops

• Led design from sketching, wireframing, and annotations

• Collaborated with stakeholders to define content strategy and wrote boilerplate content

• Facilitated roadmapping exercises and defined product strategy

Design team:

• Interview shadowing and note taking

• Workshop participation

• Design sketching, wireframing, and designed final user interface

Product team:

• Workshop participation

• Secured funding for the future of the service offering

Architecture:

• Workshop participation,

• Researched, planned, and developed the content management system “proof-of-concept”

• Developed and integrated the minimum viable product (MVP) content management system into our token system and implementation process    

Methods

• Interviewing

• Secondary (desk) research

• Service blueprint mapping

Discovery Research and Process Pain Points

I drafted a research plan to understand the process followed for our first client’s custom PBM. Interviewing a variety of internal and external stakeholders, I synthesized our findings and presented them back to the team. The most problematic pain points included the following:

• Technical limitations and lack of documentation

• Competing legal feedback

• Lengthy legal review processes

• Unstructured client brand value collection

• No client ownership

• No alignment on the offering

Service Blueprints

Pain Points Resolved:

• Competing legal feedback

• Lengthy legal review processes

To help our stakeholders visualize our process and pain points, I created a service blueprint to facilitate conversations with our Product and Business stakeholders. The diagrams became an ideal tool to visualize the team’s process, client touch-points, and identify opportunities for improvement.

With a clearer understanding of our process, I facilitated sessions with our internal legal consultants to define how our client’s custom needs could fit into their ongoing work.

Brand Values Collection Form

Pain Point Resolved:

• Unstructured client brand value collection

One of the most challenging and time-consuming parts of our implementation process was interpreting our client’s style guide and marketing assets. After closely collaborating with the Product and Engineering teams, I designed a brand value collection form to gather only the necessary assets for building a client’s custom CVS Caremark.com experience.

Leveraging this new form improved collection speed and accuracy, cutting the previous time from 2 months of “back-and-forth” conversations to just 2 weeks—accommodating time for review and edits, drastically improving efficiency and client satisfaction.

Sketching Workshops and Wireframes

Pain Points Resolved:

• Unstructured client brand value collection

• Client Ownership

I facilitated several workshops to design an internal configuration tool to enable the team to quickly generate a preview of the client’s custom CVS Caremark.com website. In addition to showing the client what they were paying, the tool directly interfaced with our design token system, which enabled our engineers to export the necessary JSON file needed for implementation.

Process Documentation, Alignment, and New Communication Channels

Pain Points Resolved:

• Technical limitations and lack of documentation

• Unstructured client brand value collection

• Client Ownership

One of the more significant hurdles with this effort was cross-team alignment. With several major teams involved, including Engineering, Architecture, Product, Design, and our business-to-business account managers, clear communication was vital to our success. To combat our previous inefficiencies and miscommunications, I facilitated workshops and interviews to document and align the various groups on our service offering and process.

The result was a 50+ page wiki and new client-specific communication channels that, by proxy, archived all decisions, project statuses, and client discussions–keeping all teams in perfect sync.

Product Roadmap

Pain Points Resolved:

• No alignment on offering

I facilitated several workshops to foster a shared understanding of our client’s and implementation team members’ needs, tasks, and goals as part of our process. Starting with empathy, I leveraged the previous process research to inform the collaborative creation of proto-persona. Creating these artifacts together grounded our team and stakeholders and made them feel included in the conversation. 

After developing a shared understanding of our “users,” I shifted the conversation back to the implementation process and our opportunities for improvement. First, we reviewed our past research that detailed the benefits of our proposed in-house CMS (Content Management System), which our team needed to align on the scope.

Reviewing a list of over 30 proposed features and functions for the CMS, we began bucketing various tools into their respective task in the implementation process. For example, an automated accessibility color checker would replace one of the tasks of our CVS UI designers, who, in our current process, review all colors to ensure that they are compliant with CVS Health and WCAG standards. 

With the features bucketed, we mapped out the features across 3 phases: 

1. MVP (minimum viable product) - for our team, this meant what features would have the most significant impact and save us the most time.

2. Features needed before client usage - the team’s vision, or North Star, was to inevitably scale the in-house CMS solution into an externally facing product that our clients could use—I.e., eliminating additional CVS steam members from the process and, by proxy, saving time and money.

3. Our last bucket of features built up our backlog. These features were not essential to our MVP. However, we knew that several, if not most, would provide value and were worth investigating in the future.