Learning from others

In the vein of the last post (what went well, what didn’t go well, what can i try next time?), I decided to apply this exercise to a particularly bad customer service experience I had at the local drug store. But this time I would apply those 3 questions to how the pharmacy performed.

What went well?
Not a lot in this case, the one thing they did manage to do well was take the drop offs quickly and get you on your way.

What didn’t go well?
Customers were very frustrated, it took a long time to get prescriptions filled, there was no communication between staff and the customers. Over promised on delivery time.

What can we try next time?
Let customers know what is going on, people will be less likely to get angry if they are aware of what the situation is. Don’t have people moving from one station to another, on a couple of situations one worker would bring the prescription up to the front, talk to the customer about it and then hand it off to another worker to ring through, just drop the prescription off and go back to filling more. Be honest about how long something is going to take, again people are less likely to be angry if you tell them it’s going to be 45 minutes and you deliver in 30, then if you tell them it will be ready in 20 mins and it takes 30.

There are a lot great things to improve on in this situation, and it translates for me into work life. We deal in a customer focused environment and these types of situations can arise (and have in the past). Just because I deal in software and they deal in drugs (see what i did there?) doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned from both.