JD Power Customer Service Leaders – Pharmacy

Understanding how top performers achieve excellence is the first step to becoming a Customer Service Champion. The rest is up to you.

This is the statement by Gary Tucker, SVP, J.D. Power & Associates at the beginning of their publication Achieving Excellence in Customer Service from February 2011. 

If you’ve never read their reports, you should understand that they look at five areas – people, presentation, price, product, and process.  Interestingly, they use several examples from pharmacy to make their points about these five categories:

• Proactive communications
• Private space for consultation
• Clear information about how to save money
• Auto-refill

Another interesting thing they look at is whether the gap between high performing and low performing company has increased or decreased over time.  In the product industries, the gap has decreased due in many ways to quality improvements.  In the service industries, the gap has increased…WHY?

First, advances in technology have created new expectations among customers, resulting in new challenges for services. For instance, customers expect multi-channel service delivery and expect to choose whether to interact with their service provider in person, via the phone or e-mail, through online chat, or via Web-based self-service, among others. More challenging is that they expect the same level of service across communication channels. With ever-improving technology, it has been difficult for companies to keep all systems up to date and to remain equally effective in each.

They are preaching to the choir here.  This is exactly what I tell clients all the time. 

One of their examples that I’ve used for years is around the power of communications.  They show satisfaction with auto insurance based on whether your premium stayed the same or increased.  For those that it increased, they look at whether you were pro-actively informed and whether you had the option to discuss it.  What group do you think had the highest satisfaction?

• Decreased premium
• Increased premium, pro-active notification, and chance to discuss
• No change
• Increased premium, pro-active notification
• Increased premium, no notification

Worried about satisfaction or churn?  Have lots of changes to plan design?  Here’s why you communicate.

In this report, they call out 40 companies as exceptional out of the 800 that were ranked.  7 of those 40 were pharmacies:

• Good Neighbor
• Health Mart
• Kaiser Permanente
• Publix
• Veteran’s Administration Mail Order
• Wegmans
• Winn-Dixie