Birdi

The Client

Birdi is the fast and friendly digital drug store of the future. The company is on a mission to make prescription home delivery better by offering low drug prices, free and flexible delivery options, and expert help when customers need it. Birdi delivers hundreds of thousands of prescriptions a year throughout the U.S. 

The Situation

With 60% of consumers expecting a digital healthcare experience that mirrors the convenience and quality of retail, and more than a quarter (26%) of consumers saying they’d switch providers for a better digital experience, the healthcare space is quickly realizing that it is not immune when it comes to customer expectations for their digital experiences. That’s why Birdi spent years studying the issues, friction, and pain points of the retail and online pharmacy experience. The company’s vision was to create a new digital pharmacy that would make prescription home delivery faster, easier, and more affordable than ever. Its next-generation home delivery solution would provide a better, more holistic experience for both consumers and employer groups.

In addition to achieving its broader brand goals, Birdi wanted to employ agile solutions and features, giving its staffers the ability to easily and quickly change or add future content.

The Challenge

For consumers, ordering and purchasing prescriptions have historically been complicated, time-consuming, and in some cases, a barrier to their care. Many existing online and retail pharmacies don’t focus on the customer experience, resulting in more friction, cost, and delays between the consumer, prescriber, and payer. It’s not surprising that 50% of consumers say that a bad digital experience can ruin their relationship with a healthcare provider.

With the increasing interest in online pharmacies, Birdi wanted to provide customers with a fast, easy, and affordable way to purchase their medications. The company felt confident in its back-end fulfillment operation, but much less confident in the strength of its digital operations. It wanted an upgraded solution to improve, simplify, and optimize the customer experience. 

Birdi also wanted to make sure it was meeting the needs of its customer segments. For the older demographic — a group more likely to have ongoing medications — Birdi wanted a solution that was predictable and reliable, offering a high level of service. For younger Birdi users, process speed and free shipping were of utmost importance. In response to these needs, Birdi offers free shipping on all of its prescriptions and envisioned creating a digital medicine cabinet that provides customers with a visual depiction of all of their medications and where they are in the fulfillment process — from contacting their doctor to receive the script to the tracking number once the prescription is shipped. 

The Solution

To successfully launch the new brand website and app, Birdi needed a partner to craft a frictionless solution that would improve and simplify the current customer experience. The company tapped digital innovation partner Bounteous to bring the new experience to life with Drupal and its composable architecture. 

Bounteous kicked off the project by pulling together features and functionality from several teams, unifying them into one cohesive project plan for the experience. The team conducted extensive research to ensure the new experience would be meaningful and customer-centric, alleviating customer pain points and making the customer journey much smoother from start to finish.

In addition to creating editable Drupal pages, the team also built the website application for requesting and filling prescriptions. This included creating an ecosystem for the existing user and pharmacy APIs, new APIs for messaging and drug lookup, and a chatbot feature. Acquia’s solutions made deploying and updating decoupled experiences quick and easy. 

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Bounteous collaborated with Birdi’s branding agency to bring the new experience to life using Drupal, React, and Gatsby. The new Birdi site serves as a stellar example of headless Drupal as it pulls data from both the content management system (CMS) and Birdi’s existing database into a seamless, functioning website. And the decoupled approach also provides Birdi with the agility, flexibility, and freedom to use different CMS and e-commerce systems in different regions without having to completely reinvent the wheel.

Acquia’s solutions proved to be a game changer for Birdi’s site performance and availability. Given the program’s complexity, Birdi needed an API-first CMS to power the entire ecosystem. Drupal’s API-first model allowed the teams to easily access APIs, providing a fast and reliable solution. Additionally, Acquia’s caching tools help ensure a quick response time.

The project especially benefited from Acquia’s Build and Launch Tool (BLT), which provides a suite of DevOps tools that helped the teams deploy the new decoupled experience. Appropriate for building both back-end Drupal and front-end Gatsby assets, the BLT was invaluable in helping build a fast, reliable DevOps pipeline to easily refresh the site as changes are made to content.

The Results

Despite all the unforeseen challenges of 2020 and 2021, Birdi was able to reach its goals, which included creating a new solution to reach consumers digitally and provide them with an improved, simplified customer experience. Acquia’s products were a key factor in the speedy yet well-informed development of these solutions.

The Birdi site went live in 2021 – on time and budget – with the Birdi app launch following in October 2021. In the first six months post-launch, Birdi saw a 42% increase in prescription orders via its digital properties. The updated site realized more than 120,000 sessions — including more than 50,000 site visitors and more than 25,000 orders — and filled nearly 50,000 individual prescriptions, all without any media or marketing drivers. To date, Birdi and its predecessor company have filled more than 5 million prescriptions.

Today, Birdi serves over 100,000 customers and ships more than 600,000 prescriptions annually. Birdi-registered pharmacists and patient care specialists are available to provide high-touch, personalized services, answering questions and providing solutions for patients and prescribers. Aiming to make ordering necessary medicines online as easy and painless as ordering a T-shirt, Birdi provides customers with detailed tracking, allowing them to know exactly where their script is in the process. And Birdi’s call center speed to answer is just 20 seconds — less than half the industry average.

Birdi continues to work with its technology and innovation partners to make improvements and evolve the Birdi experience, including increasing accessibility, optimizing SEO, and releasing new features regularly.