The Product
A smart, web-based inventory management solution for pharmacies in the retail, long term care, and acute space.
My Role & The Team
I was the product experience designer that led the vision, built the solution, facilitated internal testing, participated in creating an adoption campaign, and performed subsequent research to measure success.
Stakeholders Involved
- Manger of the Account Management Team
- Customer Care Employee
- Senior Engineer
- Operations Manager
- Product Manager
02 Discovering the Problems
To identify recurring impacts to the customer's experience of the application, I began running reports from within the corporate customer care ticketing application to better understand the types of customer care tickets being submitted by our customers.
One of the One of the findings from this effort was that, in 2022, 12% of all the accounts that asked the Customer Care Team to perform the task of adding an item to inventory, made the request, on average, more than twice a month. Our highest grossing requesting account averaged 24 requests a month.
This stood out as a problem area to me because the process by which an item is added to inventory is self-service in the customer facing application. This begs the questions, why are customers asking us to do for them that which they can do for themselves?
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03 Defining the Problem
The fact that customers asking the Customer Care Team to perform a task that they themselves could perform points to a need to increase training and/or reconfigure the UI to be more intuitive.
04 Defining the Main Problem
How might we assist customers in navigating the complexity of requesting items be added to their inventory so that they can have a more holistic view of their inventory sooner?
05 Designing the Solution
Due to a backlog of issues, the decision was made to create a stopgap using a third party application to assist in automating the task of adding an item to an account's inventory.
The overall solution required a multi-step approach. First, the system needed to collect the two most pertinent pieces of information needed to perform the task. This information would be collected using a chat-like feature (see image below).
Once this information was collected, the system then needed to utilize it at the right point of the workflow to ensure the correct item, in the correct quantity, was being added to the customer's account.
Branching and additional logic need to be leveraged depending on certain aspects of the item being requested and the permissions of the user id accessing the automation. (see image below)
06 Testing the Concept Internally
After many rounds of internal QA, the solution had a soft launch into production and we encouraged the Customer Care Team to utilize the automation for one week to fulfill customer requests to add an item into their inventory. At the end of one week, we interviewed the customer care team about their thoughts. (Which were highly positive!)
07 Raising Awareness
With sign off from the Customer Care Team, we began a campaign to bring awareness to the new feature and encourage adoption.
For customers and employees, we published release notes as well as circulated a a video of the automation in action. Over the next two months, our account managers personally contacted accounts that continued to rely on customer care to add items into their inventory.
08 Impact
While usage of the new feature was low in its first month, with targeted marketing and circulation of the presence and benefit of the new feature, we saw a 65% decrease in monthly customer care tickets specifically related to adding an item to inventory.
In a 4 month time frame, over 1900 items were added to inventory. This reflects that customers are now adding more items to inventory themselves than they ever previously asked the Customer Care team to add for them. This means more holistic visibility into pharmacy items on the shelves as well as less work for the Customer care team.
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