Knowing your pharmacy customers can help you adopt new solutions to improve the service and patient satisfaction. Today’s customers’ needs and expectations are different from yesterday’s. That’s why the pharmaceutical market is constantly evolving to facilitate and help more customers receive the best and most accurate care.

However, the customer buying journey starts from the same point – a need. They either need a pharmaceutical product or a piece of advice. Then, they move further into the journey to get this need met. Some will visit a physical store to buy the product they want, or call a pharmacy to get it delivered to their home, or order online through the website/app. From this moment onward, you are responsible for satisfying the customers’ requests until they receive the order or get the proper advice. Everything in-between should be taken into consideration to ensure a smooth, successful experience.

Ahead, we will talk about 3 prominent types of customers while illustrating the most common needs and situations you need to consider to enhance the overall pharmacy experience.

Physical Store Visitors

Those customers value personalized human interaction. They want some experts to talk to and show empathy. From the moment they enter the pharmacy, their experience starts to shape. Everything can affect their interaction, whether it is the pharmacy organization and the service type or the order accuracy and offered discounts.

A customer expects to be dealt with as if they are the only patient to be served, with instant care and support. If your pharmacy is not prepared with the proper technology and data to support your patients, you might be losing some already.

Investing in a smart pharmacy management system improves patient care to a great extent. Such a tool helps you collect valuable customer data that you can analyze and use to provide personalized service and advice. You will be able to track and monitor your inventory and stock availability to never miss a patient order.

Additionally, you can enhance the level of professionalism, the accuracy, and performance by tracking the employee’s workflow and input. 

Home Delivery Customers

Most patients who order pharmaceutical products through phone calls might be having a critical issue that prevents them from visiting the physical store. Maybe they are old in age or suffer from a serious illness. Hence, you should handle them with utmost care and fast service. 

You don’t really know how severe the situation is, so you need to move fast and make sure they get the right order. Also, due to the lack of physical interaction, you might find difficulty hearing the patient or understanding their order, especially if they are saying a medicine name.

Integrating a multi-functional pharmacy ERP software into your management helps you keep an eye on all orders statuses to make sure they are delivered on time. Therefore, you won’t jeopardize the business or the patient’s life which might result from unnecessary delays and inaccuracy of order.

Online Customers

Today, and especially after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, more customers are requesting pharmaceutical items online, either through pharmacies’ websites/apps or other delivery apps. When the curfew was strictly applied and more shops were closed, these were the options that saved lives.

Most pharmacy owners now are bringing their pharmacies online to allow people to shop and buy from anywhere, at any time. Similarly, online customers have many things in common with the other types of customers, such as personalized treatment, fast service, accuracy of orders, etc. But on top of that, they need a variety of payment options besides regular cash payments.

As a general rule, you should diversify the payment options you adopt in your business to include debit/credit cards, gift cards, cash, loyalty points, and more. This gives more freedom to customers to pay the way they want without worrying about it.