Reducing Friction in Healthcare Drive-Thrus
By combining service design and behavioral science, we helped a national healthcare retailer streamline checkout and reduce wait-time anxiety.
Challenge
The Drive-Thru is meant to make healthcare more convenient—but for the country’s largest healthcare retailer, satisfaction scores at the window were consistently lower than in-store pickup, even when actual wait times were shorter. The company brought in Cloudberry for a fresh, outside perspective—to explore the Drive-Thru experience from every angle and uncover root causes of dissatisfaction hidden in workflows, communication, or systems.
Our Approach
We conducted multi-week observational studies and interviews with employees and customers across a range of geographies—examining not just the Drive-Thru interaction, but the entire ecosystem behind it. This included in-store workflows, checkout systems, internal IT tools, and operational bottlenecks that shaped how service was delivered and perceived.
Key components included:
- Service Journey Mapping: Mapped the full experience from arrival through checkout and prescription pickup—identifying key moments of friction for both customers and colleagues.
- POS Interface Redesign: Delivered a simplified, behaviorally informed point-of-sale interface to reduce time-consuming interactions, improve visibility, and support faster decision-making for staff.
- “Time-Bomb” Detection Strategy: Identified prescription scenarios likely to trigger delays and designed early detection concepts to triage and redirect them before they impacted the line.
- Future-State Recommendations: Provided a strategic roadmap with pilot-ready ideas like mobile pre-check-in, alternate lane routing, and staffing flow adjustments—built to reduce congestion during peak hours.
Outcomes
- Redesigned POS interface estimated to reduce average transaction time by 20 seconds, generating significant time and cost savings across high-volume locations
- Strategic pilot concepts aligned internal CX, operations, and IT teams on shared experience goals
Why Cloudberry
Cloudberry brought a fresh lens to a problem that had been studied for years—connecting behavioral insight with frontline realities to uncover opportunities others had overlooked. Our blend of research, design, and systems thinking helped move the conversation beyond isolated fixes toward scalable solutions that work for both customers and the teams serving them.
