Personalization strategy connecting Retail Health, Pharmacy and Front Store in the CVS App.
My role: Product designer, Strategist, Domain lead
Deliverables: End-to-end design solutions, journey mapping, research and testing.
Timeline: November 2023
I served as the product design strategist responsible for bridging CVS’s physical initiatives with its digital experience, ensuring that every touchpoint—from in-store hydration stations to app-driven wellness journeys—worked together seamlessly. My role involved:
Research & Analysis: Conducting a comprehensive market and competitor review, and partnering with research teams to interview customers, particularly in high-temperature regions, to validate that our digital solutions met real-world needs.
Strategic Alignment: Leading hypothesis workshops and developing detailed personas and empathy maps that aligned CVS’s brand vision with customer expectations and operational feasibility.
Iterative Design & Collaboration: Employing a narrative design approach and facilitating cross-functional ideation workshops to map out the customer journey, identify friction points, and iteratively test digital concepts, ensuring the final design was both intuitive and accessible.
Measurable Impact: Delivering a scalable, omni-channel personalization framework that significantly enhanced customer engagement by integrating location-based recommendations, hydration alerts, and tailored wellness plans. This unified strategy not only deepened customer trust in CVS’s health offerings but also provided a strategic foundation for ongoing, data-driven refinements across retail, health, and pharmacy teams.
Opportunity
As CVS sought to reinforce its commitment to health and wellness, marketing and business partners recognized the need for a more personalized and community-focused experience across both digital and physical touchpoints. The goal was to create a seamless integration between in-store initiatives and digital engagement, ensuring that customers felt supported in their health journeys.
A key component of this strategy involved reimagining various touchpoints—from wellness-focused community centers to in-store displays featuring regionally relevant health products. One particularly innovative concept was a hydration station that provided water bottles and electrolytes in high-temperature regions. My role was to bridge these physical initiatives with the digital experience, ensuring that customers could easily discover, engage with, and benefit from CVS’s evolving health and wellness offerings.
By developing a digital framework that complemented in-store strategies, I helped create a more unified and engaging customer experience. This work also served as a strategic foundation for retail, health, and pharmacy teams to integrate personalization across the CVS ecosystem, ensuring that digital and physical experiences worked in harmony to meet customer needs.
Approach
To ground our personalization strategy in customer needs and business objectives, I began with a comprehensive analysis of industry leaders and competitors. This informed the development of high-level concepts that I validated through a hypothesis workshop, aligning ideas with CVS’s brand vision, customer expectations, and operational feasibility.
Recognizing hydration as a critical health factor, I partnered with the research team to conduct interviews with customers in high-temperature regions. These insights shaped our approach, ensuring that the digital experience supported real-world customer behaviors and needs.
To further refine our strategy, I developed three detailed personas and empathy maps that outlined key customer journeys. These frameworks helped align the team around core user needs and informed the design of digital touchpoints that felt personalized and intuitive. By integrating research insights with a human-centered design approach, we ensured that our personalization strategy was both meaningful and impactful.
Design Workshops & Iteration
I leveraged a narrative design approach to immerse cross-functional teams in the customer journey, fostering a shared understanding of user pain points and opportunities. Through collaborative ideation workshops, we:
Mapped out the full customer journey, identifying moments of friction and opportunity.
Developed and tested digital concepts that enhanced the in-store experience.
Iterated on key design components to ensure usability, accessibility, and effectiveness.
By maintaining an iterative approach, we continuously refined our personalization strategy based on user feedback and technical feasibility, ensuring that our solutions resonated with customers while aligning with CVS’s business goals.
The Vision & Implementation
Our personalization strategy focused on creating seamless omni-channel experiences that bridged digital and physical interactions. Key initiatives included:
Location-Based Personalization: Tailoring app content based on regional health trends, ensuring customers received relevant recommendations for wellness products and services.
Integrated Hydration Awareness: Using push notifications and app content to promote hydration in high-temperature regions, aligning digital messaging with in-store hydration stations.
Customized Wellness Journeys: Developing app-driven wellness plans that guided customers through personalized health goals, reinforcing CVS’s role as a trusted health partner.
These initiatives not only enhanced customer engagement but also provided a scalable framework for future personalization efforts across CVS’s digital and physical ecosystem.
Success of the Launch & Ongoing Refinement
This work has set a strategic foundation for how CVS approaches personalization in health, serving as a north star for future initiatives. By seamlessly integrating digital and physical experiences, we’ve established a scalable framework that continues to evolve based on customer needs. Our iterative approach ensures that personalization efforts remain relevant and impactful, deepening engagement while positioning CVS as a leader in customer-centric health and wellness solutions. Looking ahead, this strategy will continue to shape new ways for customers to receive tailored support, making their health journeys more intuitive, connected, and meaningful.