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A Special Report:
Find Out What Pharmacists And Customers Are Telling You.

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Aside from having their prescriptions filled accurately, it is widely accepted that there are a handful of very basic things most customers everywhere expect from the typical pharmacy experience wherever they go, including:

• their medicines will be in stock
• their prescriptions will be ready on time
• their insurance will be accepted—and if not, the pharmacy will help them navigate the third-party complications
• their prescriptions will be easy to understand
• the pharmacist will be available to provide basic counsel

Depending on who the customer is, and the time of day, some of these aspects will be more critical than others in determining how satisfied the customer will be. Being able to identify different customer types is an important first step in anticipating customer needs and managing the expectations of each person. Call it patient profiling—or prioritizing.

“As a pharmacist, it is very important to be able to read people,” noted one New York metro-area pharmacist on the panel. “You have to know your customer—whoever it might be—because it is going to change throughout the day. At 8 a.m. it might be the Wall Street guy on his way to work, and at 11 a.m. it’s Mr. Jones, the retiree who lives around the corner. He wants to talk to you—it’s part of his routine. It’s his break from the TV. I just tell him, ‘Hey, I’m a little busy right now, can you give me a minute?’ And he is going to be more understanding. But the guy in the blue suit on his cell phone,” she continued, “He doesn’t want to be chit-chatted. He just wants to hear ‘Yes, we have it in stock and when would you like to pick it up?’ He doesn’t care if [he] has to come back at 5 p.m.” Moms with sick kids are another classic customer type who don’t want a lot of conversation, unless it’s about recommendations for how to make their children feel
better faster.

In some parts of the country, customer needs—not to mention the actual customers themselves—change based on the time of year. “We have a big influx of snowbirds that come down for the winter,” one Florida-area pharmacist noted of the inventory challenges of serving a population that spikes considerably from Thanksgiving to May. “You don’t know who’s coming and what they are going to need,” the pharmacist continued.

Some chains, including CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid and Wal-Mart, have invested in centralized databases that enable the chains’ pharmacists to pull up patient records in any store across the country. While it doesn’t save Sunbelt pharmacies the initial speed bump in store-level inventory when the snowbirds first sweep into town, this kind of patient record portability is a measured advantage in managing patient experiences and health outcomes for pharmacists with access to the technology. Being able to see on a screen in Florida in real time what medications a patient from Chicago is taking, and in what size and strength, beats having to ask the patient.

“We can see their insurance, what they are currently taking, what they have taken, who their doctor is, we can see when they filled the script last,” a pharmacist at a major drug chain noted.