Published by Computachem Services

P.O Box 297.
Alstonville. 2477
NSW Australia

Phone:
61 2 66285138

Recently our organisation introduced a continuous improvement philosophy in order to increase quality, and empower our staff to take ownership of the business through the decisions they make.
By rewarding the best idea each month, ePharmacy was successful in savings costs, creating participative decision making, and more importantly, ceasing the desire to implement change before it had been ratified in day-to-day operations.

The benefits realised in this approach encouraged us to ask ourselves, “How do we empower the online customer to have the same benefits?”

The first question we had to ask was, how do we know whether they want to be empowered?
To be honest, in owning traditional retail pharmacies for the past ten years, I had never asked, let alone provided a vehicle to allow them.
The solution was email with its perceived benefits of anonymity.
The old cliché of “the pen is mightier than the sword” provides ammunition for a decisive dissection of what is good and bad about our service.
Email excluded, I can count on one hand the amount of written correspondence I have received over the past ten years in regard to my business platform, but with the advent of email, we receive them daily in their droves.

To harness this feedback in some type of orderly constructive way, we gave all our registered email newsletter subscribers the chance to offer their expert advice on how we could improve our site, our stores, and our customer service.
To sweeten the pie, we offered a $50 ePharmacy voucher to the best entry.
To our amazement, we had a 0.1percent response, which considering the volume of newsletter subscribers we have was a fantastic volume of replies.
On top of this, the quality of the feedback was exceptional, and an underlying desire to enhance the online shopping experience was detected, opposed to a forum to complain.
In addition, implementation of some of the ideas may lead to potential cost savings and revenue generation in the thousands of dollars.

To extrapolate this idea back to our traditional pharmacy businesses, we had to realise the different facilities available.
These customers would not be bothered to let us know how we could improve, or what we are doing wrong – or would they?
As we seem to be well-established unpaid clerks for information collection, would it hurt to ask them an extra question like, “ If you subscribe to our email newsletter, you can receive extra pharmacy information for free?”
This simple question begins the quest for empowering the customer online and I believe, in store.
We can now ask them how can we improve our offering, and what is good about our service.
Before you know it, you will have hundreds of unpaid consultants who will be only too willing to improve your offering, and become empowered in doing so.
You may then learn how close or how far you are from delivering what is expected.

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Brett @ EPharmacy