I recently had customer call me to place an order for prepackaged pharmaceuticals. This dispensing physician was getting ready to leave on vacation for a week and asked to have the order arrive at his office on a specific day. I gladly took his order, recorded the details and sent it to the team for processing. In his case, he likes to personally receive medications and make sure everything matches up. No problem. I didn’t think anything about; in fact, we frequently accommodate these requests from our dispensing clinics.
A week later, I was interacting with the faceless, impersonal machine of one of my vendors and my customer came to mind. Schedule an order with a giant company for delivery on a specific date? If they had it in inventory, I might get it on a specific date with overnight shipping. Call my rep to ask a question? Not unless I could wait 3-4 hours for him/her to get back with me. It is easy to forget the power of the little things. I still have clinic staff that call me on my cell phone or email me directly for all of their medication orders. I don’t mind; in fact, I’m quite thankful that they did call or email. Pharmaceutical wholesalers can be notoriously unresponsive or slow. I want my medical clinic customers to know that we really value them – even with the small orders. Physicians, nurses, dentists and staff from our clinic customers are very busy serving their patients. We need to be ready when they are.
Well, I have to go…a customer is calling.
