As consumer prescription spending rises and margins grow tighter, competition is becoming more and more intense for retail pharmacies everywhere. To stay competitive in the ever-growing pharmaceutical market, it’s crucial for pharmacy owners to establish streamlined, maximized operations that keep their business running smoothly day in and day out allowing them to spend more time focusing on patient health. But if you’ve already hired hard-working people, established regular processes and procedures, and installed innovative technology tools, how else can you improve your retail pharmacy? That’s where your pharmacy analytics come in. Here’s how you can leverage data and analytics to create a more profitable, successful retail pharmacy:
Set Better Goals
Setting goals are an integral part of running a successful business. While it’s important to set general, big-picture business goals, retail pharmacy owners should also establish shorter-term, measurable business goals. Having a set number objective to work towards is more motivating for both management and retail staff, and can encourage increased performance.
To create these targets, pull pharmacy reports to identify any problem areas where you’d like to see improvement. Analyzing your pharmacy analytics can help you not only set more quantitative, attainable goals, but can also help you discover issues you didn’t even know existed.
Once you’ve established your key performance indicators, use your current and previous data to create benchmarks and subsequent targets for you and your team.
Strengthen Patient Relationships
Just like with any business, one of the largest goals for any retail pharmacy is creating loyal, satisfied customers. But competitive prices and products don’t have as much of an influence today as creating real, long-term relationships with each customer. Consumers today want to feel cared about and connected to the brands they love, and your pharmacy is no exception.
To do so, pharmacy owners need to look for ways to provide more value and personalization to their customers during each and every interaction. Leverage your customer data to dig deeper into your customer base and find out who they are, what their buying patterns typically are, and what types of messaging they respond best to. The right technology can even help automate the process.
Once this data is collected and analyzed, it can be used to create personalized marketing messaging, recommend relevant products and services, and more.
Improve Productivity
As a retail pharmacy owner, you want your business to be operating like a well-oiled machine. Sustainable employee productivity requires constant, detailed attention– which is where your pharmacy analytics come into play. Workflow reports can identify bottlenecks in staff productivity with a click of a button.
These reports can be used to discover how long it takes your staff to process a prescription, take a customer through the checkout process, and how many prescriptions are waiting for pickup at any given time. Add-on sales reports can also show the breakdown of your sales, to identify how often prescriptions are sold without front shop items, or vice-versa.
Once you identify the areas you’d like to improve, create measurable objectives for your team and keep track of progress to maintain these goals and maximize productivity year-round.
Cut Costs
Labor costs:
Using data and analytics to cut your costs may sound too good to be true, but it’s becoming a crucial tool for profitable pharmacies everywhere. Pull sales reports to see what times of the year, week, or day your store is busier, and when your slow points normally occur. Use this information to create a customized employee schedule, ensuring you’re only staffing the amount of people you need– cutting down on overall labor costs.
Inventory costs:
Pharmacy owners can use inventory analyses to optimize their inventory around-the-clock. Analyze inventory reports to gain visibility into which inventory is selling best, when it sells, and what items tend to move slower. This deeper look into your inventory allows you to find the perfect balance of not too much and not too little. This maximizes your inventory investment, improves cash flow and eliminates wasted inventory products and profit.
If your retail pharmacy is looking for that next-level business strategy it needs to stay competitive, it may be time for you to leverage more of your data and analytics. The increased operational efficiency will create a more sustainable pharmacy, and increase your recognition as a key medical professional in your community for years to come.
The right technology tools can do all of the hard work for you, automatically tracking, consolidating, and creating customized reports whenever and wherever you need them. Contact Auto-Star today for more information on our industry-leading technology solutions for your retail pharmacy.
