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.
Industry studies over the years have consistently shown that individualized, responsive, and efficient customer service is the key factor that leads customers to choose an independent pharmacy over chain, big box, grocery store, or mail order pharmacies. Making the most of that clear advantage over the competition by anticipating and meeting customer needs is key to making the most of your business.
However, mainlining that edge isn't easy amidst the challenges independent pharmacists face today. The definition of customer service has changed quite a bit in recent years. Where the primary focus was once all about delivering prescriptions quickly and accurately, that focus has expanded today as pharmacies have taken on a more active role in the health care system by providing a wide variety of services. The volume of prescriptions filled every day in the average pharmacy has steadily risen as an aging population, managing more chronic health conditions, has led to increased medication demand.
Meanwhile, even as the responsibilities and workload of the average pharmacy has increased, changes in reimbursement rates, new regulations and other factors have squeezed profit margins throughout the industry. What all this boils down to is that keeping your pharmacy competitive and profitable means doing more with less, so the most straightforward option for maximizing your ability to provide that individualized, responsive service – higher staffing levels – isn't feasible.
However, maximizing the efficiency of your pharmacy workflow is very feasible, and doing so with an emphasis on that all-important completive edge – exceptional customer service – in mind is essential, one that is designed to provide you and your staff with the time and flexibility you need to anticipate and meet customer needs. To do this, your pharmacy workflow must focus on speed and efficiency to minimize the time you and your staff spend behind the counter filling prescriptions, creating more time for customer interactions. This may, depending upon your particular circumstances, mean delegating more tasks to techs to free up pharmacist time, automating some steps of the dispensing process, updating technology to move processing along faster while maintaining accuracy, or investing more efficient workstations and/or storage and inventory solutions to reduce the amount you and your staff must spend traveling gather supplies, as well as the time spent locating them.
Of course, no two independent pharmacies are alike, so designing a pharmacy workflow system that allows you to anticipate customer needs is a very individual process that depends upon a thorough evaluation of your current workflow practices to pinpoint where change is needed. Objectivity is essential to an accurate evaluation, and being objective isn't easy when you're evaluating your own practices. For that reason, you might find that you'll get the best results in streamlining your pharmacy workflow by bringing a consultant into the mix. That small investment to gain the perspective of a professional, unbiased outsider will likely bring great returns, resulting in a tighter, more streamlined and focused workflow than you could accomplish on your own.
