SHELF OBSESSED

To thrive in today's business climate, which is dominated by the big-box one-stop shopping model, smaller businesses like independent community pharmacies must maximize their primary competitive advantage – personable and personalized customer service. In other words, the atmosphere and customer experience that makes people feel like they are doing business with neighbors, not a faceless national corporation that only knows them as a customer profile on a computer screen. So how can you make your store the most loved pharmacy in your neighborhood?

Anticipating the needs of your current and potential customers is key to building customer satisfaction and loyalty and, given the ever-growing role of the community pharmacy in health and well-being, those needs are more complex than ever before. Of course, understanding and anticipating these more complex customer needs means spending more time getting to know your customers, and accommodating those needs means being flexible. Incorporating those qualities into your busy routine on a consistent basis depends heavily on a well-designed and very efficient pharmacy workflow.

Developing a loyal customer base is the key to not just surviving, but thriving as an independent pharmacy amid a sea of big corporate competition. The key to building that solid customer base is making people feel good about using your pharmacy – better than they would feel about saving a few cents here and there shopping in those big box stores. So what can you do to create that sort of customer experience?

In today's connected world, customer reviews have become an important factor for consumers as they shop for products and services – an updated, supercharged version of word-of-mouth advertising. That means good reviews are an important aspect of building the solid reputation that your independent pharmacy needs in order to develop a solid customer base. If your reviews aren't quite where you'd like them to be, improving them could be easier than you think.

If you're running an independent pharmacy and are struggling with tight profit margins, you're not alone. Staying competitive in today's business climate isn't easy, with stiff competition from those well-financed corporate chain stores, falling prescription reimbursement rates, and new regulations associated with health care reform, putting the squeeze on your bottom line. However, there are things you can do to improve your bottom line, despite these challenges.

If you need to upgrade your pharmacy shelving but have been forced to keep it on the back burner due to financial considerations, you should know that your much-needed pharmacy facelift doesn't have to be put off indefinitely. The upgrades can be conducted – and conducted well – on a tight budget with some careful planning. Here, we've put together some tips that can help you upgrade your pharmacy shelving and/or fixtures without breaking the bank.

When it comes to pharmacy workflow, much of the typical discussion centers around the ways efficiency can boost productivity, helping the average independent pharmacy turn out more prescriptions every day – which, of course, benefits profitability. However, as important as profitability is to the survival of a small business, here we're going to focus on another very important benefit of improving your workflow process: increased patient safety, a factor that most independent pharmacists are more concerned about than they are about their bottom line.

If you're struggling to meet daily production goals in your independent pharmacy, finding the reason for that frustrating problem means evaluating your pharmacy workflow – the way your work gets done – step by step. Doing this isn't as simple as it may sound, which is exactly why workflow problems often linger unnoticed long enough to have an impact on production, as well as other important aspects of your business – including your bottom line. To help you accurately identify inefficiencies in your everyday workplace routine, we've put together some basic tips on how to evaluate your pharmacy workflow.

If your goal is to carve out a niche for your business as a unique, responsive, community-minded independent pharmacy, distinctly different from the big box competition, a cookie-cutter layout and atmosphere definitely isn't the way to get there. You need something that is as distinctly different from the look and feel of those corporate chain stores as your business strives to be. So how can you go about achieving that goal? Isn't pharmacy shelving pretty much standard – a one size fits all sort of thing?

Staying competitive as an independent pharmacy in today's business climate means staying sharp when it comes to everyday operation of your business. A key element of that is optimal efficiency in your pharmacy workflow process. However, it isn't always easy to spot mistakes and inefficiencies in that process when you're right in the thick of it every day. To help you recognize potential problems with how work gets done in your pharmacy, here are 4 common mistakes that can damage efficient pharmacy workflow.