Pharmacy Service Improvement at Cvs
Background
CVS (Consumer value store) faced increasing customer complaints that prevented the company from stronger growth. This problem was initially perceived to be due to poor customer service; however, by historical data analysis and customer interviews, Pharmacy Service Initiative (PSI) including “operations executives and managers”, “pharmacy supervisors, top pharmacists and consultants from the Boston Consulting Group” found that it was issues in the fulfillment process that resulted in customer dissatisfaction. The team was eager and enthusiastic to make “initiative” changes to solve the problem without compromising “customer safety”. The remaining part of this case study analysis is discussing about key issues found in the fulfillment process and recommended action steps to solve them.
Key issues
1. Lack of management of customers’ expectation
Due to the following reasons, customers could not get what they were expecting while they found the fulfillment process too long.
a. “Unauthorized refills”. Customers often did not keep “track of how many refills were allowed” and therefore submitted ineligible scripts. In addition, it normally took a day on average to get a response from a doctor to whether a refill was approved. This caused customers impatient and especially upset when the refills were not allowed.
b. Scripts rejected for payment by insurance. That the payers wanted to control their costs by delivering long rules about drugs, refilling time and payment conditions truly complicated pharmacy employees’ work and lengthened wait time for a refill. At the same time, customers might not be aware of these rules and conditions until they came to pick up the prescriptions and were informed by the pharmacy employees about the situation, which was beyond their expectation.
c. DUR hard stop problem. As the information was sometimes incorrectly recorded due to written scripts, a DUR hard stop was generated and pharmacy employees had to call doctors
CVS (Consumer value store) faced increasing customer complaints that prevented the company from stronger growth. This problem was initially perceived to be due to poor customer service; however, by historical data analysis and customer interviews, Pharmacy Service Initiative (PSI) including “operations executives and managers”, “pharmacy supervisors, top pharmacists and consultants from the Boston Consulting Group” found that it was issues in the fulfillment process that resulted in customer dissatisfaction. The team was eager and enthusiastic to make “initiative” changes to solve the problem without compromising “customer safety”. The remaining part of this case study analysis is discussing about key issues found in the fulfillment process and recommended action steps to solve them.
Key issues
1. Lack of management of customers’ expectation
Due to the following reasons, customers could not get what they were expecting while they found the fulfillment process too long.
a. “Unauthorized refills”. Customers often did not keep “track of how many refills were allowed” and therefore submitted ineligible scripts. In addition, it normally took a day on average to get a response from a doctor to whether a refill was approved. This caused customers impatient and especially upset when the refills were not allowed.
b. Scripts rejected for payment by insurance. That the payers wanted to control their costs by delivering long rules about drugs, refilling time and payment conditions truly complicated pharmacy employees’ work and lengthened wait time for a refill. At the same time, customers might not be aware of these rules and conditions until they came to pick up the prescriptions and were informed by the pharmacy employees about the situation, which was beyond their expectation.
c. DUR hard stop problem. As the information was sometimes incorrectly recorded due to written scripts, a DUR hard stop was generated and pharmacy employees had to call doctors