PHARMACIES

Managing High-Volume Calls and Customer Traffic

Retail pharmacies expected to fill 4 billion prescriptions by 2006. Clearly, there's a shortage of pharmacists. No wonder, with pharmacists spending as much as 30 percent of their time on the telephone, phone traffic is a significant factor in managing day-to-day pharmacy operations.

How can you ensure that doctors and customers have fast, convenient access to their local pharmacist and that no phone call is dropped or missed?

Without information about this traffic-or about how and when doctors and customers prefer to be served-it is difficult for pharmacy management to know how to staff properly, what redundancies might be eliminated, or how to add new services.

The Vertical Pharmacy Solution

The Vertical pharmacy solution supports all the communications needs for the pharmacy and provides a simple and efficient way to manage and monitor your store communication infrastructure from a central location. With consolidated reports about call traffic and caller behavior, your strategic and operational decision makers can better understand pharmacists' productivity and the quality of call answering; analyze peak calling times and call abandonment patterns to optimize staffing; deal quickly and efficiently with any changing conditions; and track statistics on store facilities usage for dramatic cost containment.

The result: Pharmacists can get out from behind the glass window and get back to delivering quality prescription and patient care.

This cost-effective solution can:

• Provide visibility into store and employee performance, and how well customers are being served
• Automate the prescription refill process
• Fax doctor for approval of unauthorized refill requests
• Call patients for prescription refill reminders, reducing returns to stock
• Inform callers about prescription status and refills remaining
• Recognize and prioritize doctor calls by number dialed
• Tie into valuable customer, inventory management, or drug information databases
• Route callers, when appropriate, to another department or a centralized call center