Designed and launched a joined-up CRM journey across two organisations and two systems, lifting Type 2 patient subscriptions by 27%.
→ Subscription performance improved by 27%.
Problem
Abbott's Diabetes Care division had no structured customer journey for Type 2 patients across the UK and Ireland. A new coaching initiative was being set up in partnership with a third-party coaching organisation, and it needed to work alongside Abbott's existing CRM platform. Two organisations, two systems, and no single journey connecting them.
Context
I joined as Brand Manager for CRM and Ecommerce in the Diabetes Care division. The business was launching a new programme to support Type 2 patients, delivered in partnership with a third-party coaching organisation. Abbott ran its CRM on Selligent. The coaching partner ran its own separate system and process for coaching delivery. Nobody had yet worked out how a patient was supposed to move between the two without the experience falling apart.
Business objective
Abbott needed the new programme to convert. That meant getting patients into the coaching offer and keeping them subscribed, without adding friction or confusion at the point where the two systems met.
Customer/user objective
Patients needed one experience, not two. Someone signing up for support with their condition should not have to think about which organisation was running which part of it. The handoff between Abbott's CRM and the coaching partner's process needed to be invisible to the patient.
Constraints
Two organisations meant two sets of processes, two sets of stakeholders, and two systems that had never been designed to talk to each other. There was no existing precedent inside Abbott for this kind of cross-organisation journey, so the mapping work had to start from scratch. The launch also had a fixed timeline tied to the wider programme launch, which limited how long the discovery phase could run.
Stakeholders
Internal stakeholders included the CRM and marketing teams responsible for the Selligent platform, and the wider Diabetes Care brand team. The external stakeholder was the coaching partner, whose processes and systems needed to be understood and mapped alongside Abbott's own before any design work could start.
Research and discovery
I ran a CRM audit before designing anything, which gave me an actionable roadmap with KPI targets attached rather than a set of vague ambitions. Alongside that, I mapped the existing processes on both sides: how Abbott's CRM handled a patient today, and how the coaching partner's process worked once someone was referred into it. That mapping exercise showed where the journey broke down, specifically the gaps at the point of handoff between the two systems.
Options considered
The obvious shortcut would have been to treat the two systems as separate and simply point patients from one to the other with a basic referral. That would have been quicker to build but would have left the experience feeling like two disconnected services, which risked people dropping out at the handoff. The alternative was a genuinely joined-up journey, designed end to end across both organisations, even though that meant more coordination work and no existing template to follow.
Prioritisation
I chose the joined-up option because the CRM audit had already flagged retention as the thing most likely to move the needle, and a disjointed handoff was the most obvious point of drop-off risk. It was worth the extra coordination cost to protect the parts of the journey that mattered most to whether a patient stayed subscribed.
Delivery
I worked directly with the coaching partner to align their process with Abbott's CRM platform, redesigning the journey end to end rather than patching the handoff point. This meant agreeing shared definitions of where a patient sat in the journey at any given time, so both organisations were working from the same picture rather than two separate ones. The programme launched on time.
Decisions made
The core decision was to treat the two organisations' systems as one journey from the patient's point of view, even though they remained two separate platforms behind the scenes. That meant investing time in mapping and alignment work that wouldn't be visible in the final product, but which determined whether the handoff felt seamless or not.
Trade-offs
Building a genuinely joined-up journey across two organisations took longer to design than a simple referral link would have. I accepted that extra time in discovery and mapping because the CRM audit had already shown that retention, not initial sign-up, was where the programme was most likely to succeed or fail.
Business outcome
Type 2 patient subscriptions improved by 27% following the launch. The CRM audit and roadmap also gave the wider team a set of KPI targets to track performance beyond the initial launch, rather than the programme being judged only on the launch date itself.
Customer outcome
Patients got a single, coherent journey into and through the coaching programme, rather than two disconnected processes bolted together. The handoff between Abbott's CRM and the coaching partner's process worked as one experience rather than two.
Lessons learned
Cross-organisation journeys live or die at the handoff points. The most valuable work in this project wasn't the visible design, it was the unglamorous process of mapping both organisations' systems in detail before touching anything, so the gaps were found on paper rather than discovered by patients after launch.
What I'd improve today
I'd want a longer discovery phase before committing to launch dates on programmes like this. The timeline was workable, but cross-organisation mapping always throws up more edge cases than a single-system project, and more time up front reduces the risk of finding them after go-live.
