Offering home delivery used to be optional. Expected of your local pizza place? Sure. A great convenience to offer pharmacy customers? Absolutely. but not a run of the mill service commonly found across multiple retail verticals.
Today, delivery is becoming less and less of an optional service for pharmacies to offer. What once was convenience will now be considered essential by many customers.
Delivery may also be required to gain or maintain a competitive edge when your pharmacy can offer same or next day delivery in rural areas where big box and online competition cannot.
Despite the need, it can be challenging to implement a delivery program, both from a cost and a workflow perspective.
There are many ways to make delivery more sustainable from a cost perspective, like combining with your med sync program and delivering nonprescription items. (You can read more about those options here) Another way is to build delivery processes that make sense. Your program should be easy for clerks, intuitive for delivery drivers and eliminate compliance concerns.
Bottom line, your delivery program should reduce workload, not increase it. Point-of-sale based delivery options may be your best bet as they’ll utilize processes already familiar to your staff and centralize processing. Here are some other problem-solving functions to consider.
Sell prescriptions and OTC’s – Make sure your solution offers you the capability to sell and track sales of both prescription and OTC products to increase your delivery transaction margins.
Choose how the customer will pay – Credit card on file capabilities make it easy to process payments when you prepare the delivery transaction. You should also be able to flag the patient to pay with an alternate method of payment at the time of delivery.
Store and choose from multiple addresses – Attach multiple addresses to a single customer account and choose which address to deliver to each time.
Assign drivers or routes – If you have multiple drivers, or multiple routes, you’ll want to easily assign deliveries to the right route and allow drivers to claim the deliveries they are taking from the list.
Queue transactions any time – If you have one delivery device and one driver, you’ll still want to be able to queue up transactions while other deliveries are in progress.
Provide detailed instructions to your delivery drivers – Whether you’re delivering to the front door or putting the delivery behind a side gate, built in notes are a great option to make sure deliveries get to the right place.
Get Signatures and capture proof of delivery – Your solution should enable electronic signature capture so you don’t have to deal with the headache that paper signatures inevitably bring. It’s also handy to be able to snap a picture of your point of delivery in the event that you can’t snag a signature and need to leave the package.
Automatically attach captured signatures and photos to your transactions – Avoid extra steps when possible, with automation that finalizes transactions when the driver returns to the pharmacy. Unless you need to enter a collected payment, the wrap up shouldn’t require intervention.
Ready to see it in action? Check out our delivery module demo for more!
