Customer Service Is Dead

For the last 6 or so years we’ve been using a CVS location at our local Target. We landed there after the Safeway pharmacy location we used prior went out of network for our medical insurance. CVS was pretty good. Never super busy and we’re at Target about 27 times a week anyway, so getting drugs never needs to be an extra trip.

The staff was pretty good. We’ve got a couple of weird drugs that need special handling. It was nice get things dialed with the pharmacist so we didn’t have to keep explaining all the complications over and over.

Then we stopped seeing the pharmacist behind the counter. The photos for pharmacists at the location and pharmacy manager disappeared off the wall. Hmm, curious. Turns out that our location went from a full fledged pharmacy location to a standalone dispensing pharmacy; the difference being that there is no pharmacist at that location at all.

A pharmacist technician does all the day to stuff of working out insurance details and filling prescriptions. If the customer has questions about the drug they file over to a hotline that calls the standalone CVS location down the street for the pharmacist works.

I had this come up once. Somehow, one of our existing prescriptions started showing up a new prescription, even though it was something we’d been getting for a years, so the pharmacist tech pulled the drug and had a “need to talk to the pharmacist” flag on it. So, they called up the other store, and I twiddled my thumbs for 15 minutes waiting for them to take my call. Turns out they just needed to ask me if I had any questions about the drug, even though it wasn’t new. Annoying as that all sounds, it wasn’t really problematic since most of the drugs we use are pretty routine and we’ve never had the need to talk to the pharmacist since then.

Today, I was picking up drugs for 2 peeps in my family (of which I was neither). Pharmacist tech was juggling the phone and 2 customers ahead of me at the same time. To her credit, she wasn’t frazzled at all and could keep all the details straight between the customers.

She asked if I was picking up today and I said, yup. She said to start keying in my details on a new tablet based interface. First name, last name, month and day for date of birth. It then correctly listed the prescription to pick up. The tech saw this on her side and grabbed the right bag.

I said, ok, cool, now I’ve got another prescription for a different person. ok, just hit the button to add another person. um, there is no button for that. really? ok, lets finish this order and do another for the other person. Efficient? nope, but workable just enough, I guess.

I get why they want you to do more of the work when picking up your drugs; people are expensive. If you can reduce headcount the day to day operations, you save the company a lot of money.

I’m tech savvy and really wouldn’t mind the DIY tablet stuff if was designed better (ie: ways to handle slightly more complex than average pickups) and worked better (tablet is slow and just tapping simple stuff takes multiple tries.) They can probably fix both in software, but I’m not holding my breath.