3 Things That Improve When You Run a Customer-Centric Pharmacy

Customer-centricity is the concept of doing business where the customers and their experiences become the focus of your pharmacy as opposed to products and sales.

Giving name to something that many pharmacies have found to be essential for success, customer-centricity goes beyond simple customer service. The customer-centricity concept creates a strong foundation for thriving pharmacy businesses.

Why is customer-centricity so important? And how exactly does the distinction between customer service and customer-centricity make such a big difference?

The answer is pretty simple. All roads on your customer-centricity journey lead to higher profitability. And perhaps best of all, customer-centric approaches tend to have a snowball effect. The more customer-centric you are, the more you can do and the more results you’ll see.

Here are a few areas where a customer-centric pharmacy business model can make a big difference.

Customer Loyalty

Customer Loyalty is often thought of as a program pharmacies can run to entice shoppers to return and spend. Completely true and incredibly valuable in its own right. Maintaining customers is much less expensive than attracting new ones. Plus, loyal customers tell their friends and family to help you grow through word of mouth.  While we recommend a customer loyalty program for every pharmacy, you can and should create loyalty in other ways.

Customer Loyalty is something you can cultivate by the way you care for your patients and interact with customers. Loyalty can come from the value that you create in every interaction and be sustained by the way a customer feels about shopping in your pharmacy.

You likely perform customer-centric activities that create loyalty every day. Things like counselling on a new prescription or just asking about a customer’s family, vacation plans, or pets.

Customer-centric services also help to produce loyalty. What are those? Well pretty much any clinical service you offer can help you be more customer centric. Whether it’s vaccines, point-of-care testing, supplement recommendations or anything else.

If you can create value that’s not easily found elsewhere through these customer-focused activities, customer loyalty follows.

Better Patient Outcomes

When you make the customer and their needs the center of everything you are doing, the products and solutions become a natural part of the conversation. Customer-centric care changes the optics of purchasing a supplement, for example, from an extra expense to an investment in health.

And of course, these investments, or even buy-in to counselling, lead to patients who feel better, experience better outcomes, and keep coming back.

By improving patient outcomes with a customer centric approach, you’ve created a loyal customer without any extra expense, coupons, or promotions (See how everything works so well together!)

Improved Profitability

When you take customers who keep coming back and combine that with higher product and service consumption, you’re going to make some more money.

This is why pharmacy profitability and customer-centricity go hand in hand. You can certainly have one without the other. You might be the only game in town. Or fill a niche that no one else does.

But if you can grow through focusing on customer-centricity, why wouldn’t you?

If you’re ready for more customer-centricity tips, check out the content on our YouTube Channel. We’ve got tons of great videos all about improving pharmacy profits and customer-centricity!