While customer satisfaction with mail-order pharmacies is continuing to grow, brick-and-mortar pharmacies are falling behind, according to a new survey from J.D. Power.
The firm's annual Pharmacy Study found that retail pharmacies saw overall satisfaction scores decrease by more than 10 points, while scores for mail-order pharmacies grew by six. The survey found consumers visiting brick-and-mortal facilities are facing long wait times and issues in ordering prescriptions, which is worsening the experience.
What brick-and-mortar pharmacies do best is communicate clearly with consumers, according to the survey, with 89% of customers indicating that messages from the pharmacist were offered clearly and understood.
However, there's a trust gap. Only 51% said they view their pharmacist as trustworthy, and the same percentage said prescriptions were filled quickly.
Building that trust is critical to improving the consumer experience, Christopher Lis, Ph.D., managing director of global healthcare intelligence at J.D. Power, told Fierce Healthcare in an email interview.
"The way to do that requires sufficient and great responsive staff members and pharmacists who are committed to delivering customer service excellence, while having the prescriptions in stock with timely delivery and being able to answer questions about medications," he said.
"Importantly, creating a personalized service experience can help accelerate customer trust, which means getting to know the customer by name, being responsive, managing expectations when there are delays or other issues, getting the product to the customer accurately and on-time, and being friendly and courteous," Lis added.
That said, there is room for improvement for mail-order pharmacies as well, the study found. While the key factor consumers enjoy is the convenience of ordering prescriptions, just 18% of consumers said their pharmacy has a well-designed digital experience.
Digital pharmacies also face a knowledge gap in reaching more customers, according to the survey. Less than half (48%) of people who visit brick-and-mortar pharmacies had heard of digital alternatives, and 60% of mail-order customers said the same.
A key barrier to uptake, according to the survey, is confusion around insurance benefits. People are also skeptical of trusting digital pharmacies and may not know anyone else who uses them, the survey found.
Lis said digital pharmacies can address these challenges by taking a pretty simple step.
"To remedy these potential barriers, digital pharmacies can establish a FAQ section right on their landing pages to ease customer concerns and clarify these and other issues," he said.