It was 7 a.m. on a cold December morning when I stopped at my neighborhood Walgreens store at Mountain View in California, at the corner of El Camino and Grant Road. to pick a prescription medicine for a family member. I was relieved to find that there were no customers waiting at the Pharmacy and hoped to quickly pick up the medicine and beat the traffic to work. But I was disappointed when the pharmacist told me that I had to wait for 20 minutes. Surprised by his response, when I asked the reason for the delay when there were no customers ahead of me, his response was, “I have other online orders ahead of you”.
Should online orders get preference over in-store walk-in orders?
A customer who has walked into a store to make a purchase is the most captive customer that a business can have and should be attended to immediately. It is the best opportunity you have to deliver value to a customer. If the benefits to address the needs of online customers are greater to a business or if those customers belong to an important target segment, a focused team or person should be responsible for servicing them, but not at the cost of customers who are waiting in front of you to be serviced.
For the digital customer, Walgreens provides the ability to easily scan the prescription label to request a refill using their mobile app, sending customer notifications when the prescription is ready to be picked up, thus ensuring that customers do not have to wait in a line. Enhancing services using innovative technology saves time and definitely enhances the customer’s experience with Walgreens. However, all the interaction points should deliver the same level and quality of service.
LESSONS IN CX MANAGEMENT – A digital customer experience should not be improved or sustained at the cost of a poor in-store experience. On the other hand, if waiting for service is a strategy to promote impulsive purchases of other products, making sure that customers can self sign in or get a number in the queue before they are enticed to shop, results in a better experience even though there is some waiting time involved. Consistent and well thought through experience across all interactions and channels is the foundation of delivering an awesome service.
On another day, I was at the same Walgreens in the middle of rush hour, at noontime when most people visit Walgreens to pick up prescriptions. There were only 3 employees in sight when on a normal day, there are about 8-10 employees working at the pharmacy. The line was long, with at least 7 people in waiting. I was asked to wait for 30-45 minutes and when I asked why it would take 30-45 minutes to fill my prescription, I received a curt response, “You can see that I am the only person filling the prescriptions and attending the calls.”
LESSONS IN CX MANAGEMENT – Designing a good in-store customer experience is about understanding high traffic and low traffic times and ensuring the store is well staffed to deliver optimized service during high traffic times.
Walgreens has a smart Customer Loyalty program that helps retain customers and increases foot traffic to the store. The loyalty coupons are a way to entice people to keep coming to the store to shop for food, beauty, and other products.
Source: //couponsinthenews.com
When a customer receives the reward coupon, it is valid for a limited time only and not applicable on the same day when the coupon was received. When the coupon is redeemed against qualified purchases at the customer’s second visit; the available credit is only stored in the customer’s account but cannot be used till their next store visit. Now the third time the customer returns to the store and makes a qualified purchase, they have the option of using only $5 of their available credit. For every qualified purchase, the customer receives another set of reward coupons. At their fourth visit, a customer is allowed to use the next $5 credit and/or redeem another coupon to add credit to their account. This continual cycle continues bringing repeat orders and increased sales.
The average consumer, according to Bond Brand Loyalty, belongs to about 14 loyalty programs but uses less than half of those regularly. Customer loyalty programs if personalized can help brands set themselves apart from the competition while creating a dedicated customer base.
LESSONS IN CX MANAGEMENT – As important as incentives and rewards are to hook customers, increase engagement and brand loyalty, keeping them simple, specific and personal, delivers a better experience. Demonstrating that you understand your customers and their individual habits and needs can go a long way in making your loyalty program successful. Research reveals a customer is 8X more likely to be satisfied with a customer loyalty program if they’re very satisfied with how personalized it is to them.
When customers feel taken care of, they are more inclined to buy from you again. If you want to add a personal touch, you must know what is really important to them. What really drives them? What are their passions, what makes them truly happy? Emotions play a big role in how experiences are perceived by customers and each customer is unique in that sense. When customers come to purchase prescription medicine, and have no choice but to wait more than a reasonable period of time, the associated feelings with that experience is that of “not being cared for” and “distrust”. If customers feel that a store compels them to wait so that they may use the idle time to make impulsive purchases that will benefit the store, there are feelings of distrust associated with this experience.
The emotions associated with buying prescription medicine are very different than the emotions associated with buying a birthday card for a friend or a bag of chocolates and, so the definition of the best or worst customer experience and their impacts varies.
My experience with the Pharmacy in my neighborhood Walgreens store has been that every customer is asked to wait for a minimum of 20 minutes at any time of the day. It appears that Walgreens knows that 20 minutes is long enough to make impulsive purchases but not long enough that people would consider taking a ride back home or to work to complete some chores and then return back to pick up the prescription.
LESSONS IN CX MANAGEMENT – Rewards are meant to create enhanced value. However, the consistent and efficient delivery of a core service is more valuable than a discount or reward in some situations. Recognizing the emotions associated with certain types of purchases made by customers is very important in designing the right experiences that will always create value for a customer.
In recent years, competition has heated up in the pharmacy business and online retailer, Amazon is gearing up to make an entry into this business. Walgreen recently changed their tagline from “at the corner of happy and healthy” to “Walgreens. Trusted since 1901."
Source: //whacc.org
When a brand wants to be positioned as a “trusted brand”, it is explicitly agreeing to -
- Be reliable
- Be truthful
- Be able to do or deliver what they know best
Changing the positioning of a brand to focus on “earned trust” is not sufficient to expect loyalty from customers because there are more choices available to customers today. Customers of Walgreens like myself, often wonder, “Why would an experienced Pharmacist at Walgreens take 20 minutes to dispense medicine from a rack, pack it in a bottle when a customer can search and find an over the counter drug from a similar rack in much less time?”
LESSONS IN CX MANAGEMENT – When asked why they choose to do business with a particular organization, customers give a variety of reasons, from price and simplicity of the buying process, to simply having the product that they want in stock. However, one factor that is common to all purchasing decisions is trust. Trust that the company will live up to its promises, provide the product or service it specified and not let the customer down.
Finally, every business has core products or services that form the foundation of their business and every business also has key customers that form a foundation. Over time key products and services and key customers can get taken for granted while newer, higher-profile initiatives get all the focus.
Make a list of the customers you can't afford to lose. Then list what those customers buy. Be sensitive to the emotions associated with certain purchases and refine your marketing and sales strategies and messaging so that the value of those emotions is never undermined. Focus on personalization. That list is the foundation of your business and that is what drives customer loyalty to your business. If your business has been trusted since the early 1900s, that is your greatest asset but that was also possible because the differentiators that you used yesterday worked in your favor. As markets change, customer expectations change and as new competition finds its way in your business, there are new differentiators that need to be created so that your brand stands out from the competition.
It is smarter to think through all aspects of delivering consistent value to your customers across all channels and at each interaction point, as that is what will alone sustain the customer loyalty that business has earned over the years.
NEW PHARMACY BUSINESS MODELS AND CX MANAGEMENT
Making the dispensing prescriptions workflow of the pharmacy business more efficient will reduce the time taken to process prescriptions and reduce the customer wait time. Processes can be improved starting with the organization of the work environment to make it safe and efficient for the pharmacy staff, appropriate labeling and efficient ordering and storing of tablets and capsules, syrups and mixtures, rotating stocks to determine which items to be used first based on expiry dates are all important requirements to improve the pharmacy processes that will assist in delivering a better customer experience. Source:
Source: //techdu.com/digital-marketing
There are many CX touchpoints both inside and outside a pharmacy business that can improve a customer’s total shopping experience and potentially lead to increased loyalty and sales. Bringing all the customer touchpoints together will require a combination of the personal touch with efficient processes.
As businesses learn more and more about their customers, they could also offer new value-added services that would focus on delivering higher value to customers. Today, pharmacy businesses are offering pickups of prescriptions at curbside and drive thru’s, are using will-call bagging systems that make ready prescriptions easy to find for the pharmacy staff that speed up the drive-thru workflow process, pharmacy staff are using portable devices to capture signatures and payments at designated parking spots so that customers do not have to come inside the store and wait. Pharmacies are also exploring options to create private places to discuss medications with a pharmacist.
Could the future pharmacy be an on-demand drug delivery service or mail order business that sends organized medications by dosage?
Underpinning the next business model for pharmacy business will be the personalized customer experiences driven by deep insights of customer emotions as associated with buying prescription medicines and other types of purchases, personalized messaging and interaction design, that will deliver thoughtful experiences to customers, demonstrating utmost care and trustworthiness.