Harvard Bus Review: Target's ClearRx great design

My wife would agree - Target is her preferred pharmacy.

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Four Customer Experience Lessons from Target's ClearRx
4:47 PM Monday June 1, 2009

Tags:Customers, Design, Marketing

Among my favorite examples of great customer experience is Target's ClearRx pharmacy system. Introduced 4 years ago, it provided a radical departure from the standard design of pill bottles, setting Target apart from their competition. ClearRx sports an excellent design, with clear typography, smart color coding, and flat surfaces for easier reading.

What many people might not realize is that good design work happens all the time inside companies, even companies that you would never associate with great design. The difference is that Target is able to get this great design out into the world. In looking at the ClearRx story, there are a number of lessons for anyone wanting to deliver a great experience.

1. Prototype Early
The ClearRx story begins in designer Deborah Adler's time at the School of Visual Arts. For her masters thesis, she hit upon the idea of redesigning the pill bottle, after hearing of her grandmother taking her grandfather's medicine by mistake. The result of her efforts was a design she called SafeRx. After graduating, she shopped her idea around until she found a willing partner in Target.



Had Deborah Adler presented a business plan, with a set of bullet points in a PowerPoint deck outlining functional characteristics of a new pill bottle, she would gotten no traction. By manifesting her vision in a well-executed prototype, she appealed to an emotional and visceral sense of what the pill bottle could (and should) be. Good prototypes get people to rally around an idea.

They also serve as a beacon, a north star for the product development process. Though the final bottle design appears substantially different, it embodies all the essential design criteria of the original work.

2. Gird yourself for a slog
Because ClearRx looks exactly like the kind of thing Target would create, you might assume it was a fairly speedy process. In fact it took a year, and required the coordination of a remarkable number of resources.

The bottle needed to be redesigned and refined to work within what Target's supply chain could execute -- which meant things like removing the color-coding from the label (color printers are too expensive to have in every pharmacy) and instead go with the colored rings. IT systems, particularly around CRM and point-of-sale, required significant upgrading to handle the personalized information shown on each bottle. Hundreds of pharmacists had to be trained on the new system. Marketing had to ramp up, explaining this new approach.


I've seen numerous attempts at customer experience improvement fail because of a company's unwillingness to dig in and really do what it takes to deliver. Sometimes this is because of a simple lack of momentum, but most often the cause is an organization's decision-making process. For something like ClearRx, there were dozens (if not hundreds) of decision points and "stage gates" along the way, and at any one of those, this initiative could have died or been severely compromised. I'm in awe that something this good was able to be released. One reason, already stated, was the power of the prototype. Another reason, essential for successful customer experience delivery, was...

3. Align efforts with your brand values
Target's mission is: "To make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and an exceptional guest experience, and consistently fulfilling our Expect More. Pay Less.® brand promise." ClearRx would not have succeeded at a Wal-Mart or CVS. It fed off Target's distinct personality, and such strong alignment gave ClearRx the momentum it needed to propel through the arduous process of going from prototype to delivered service.

You can't simply try to deliver any good customer experience. Because of the difficulty you'll face in getting any great new experience out into the world, you have to figure out the nature of a great experience that is appropriate to who you are.

4. Customer experience is made of people!
In an interview about what it took to make ClearRx real, Deborah commented, "[The pharmacists] were the most important people to us, they were the front line. They had to explain how to use this new system." To me, this paralleled a quote from Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher: "If you create an environment where the people truly participate, you don't need control. They know what needs to be done and they do it. And the more that people will devote themselves to your cause on a voluntary basis, a willing basis, the fewer hierarchies and control mechanisms you need."

Many, if not most, service organizations are unwilling to cede control of the experience to those people who directly interact with the customer. This is because front-line staff are usually the lowest on the totem pole, and such "individual contributors" can't be trusted to do the right thing. As such, they're given scripts to follow, and policies to adhere to, treated as automatons executing a program. Organizations delivering great customer experience appreciate the importance of the front-line staff, and empower them to do great work.

For more on the ClearRx story, I suggest reading "The Perfect Prescription", and listening to A Dose Of Design.