What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement is the way a company creates a relationship with its customer base to foster brand loyalty and awareness. It is delivering connected experiences to your customers / patients instead of single, one-off, or fleeting transactions. It means optimising your team structure, operations, and technology to create a connected feedback loop with customers. Your pharmacy needs to stay informed about customers’ evolving needs, maintain and build their brand integrity, and making ethical use of customer data to help customers have the best possible experience. A great thing to remember is that you are not just competing against the community pharmacy down the street, or the major supermarkets, or even the multiples, but you are also competing with every other experience a customer has.

This engagement can be accomplished in a combination of various ways including:

• Quality communication e.g., active listening and expert counselling.
• Friendly and approachable body language.
• Marketing campaigns e.g., health promotion activities such as Stoptober.
• Digital marketing web content e.g., an interactive website promoting your pharmacy, the staff, and the different services it offers. (Not just opening times).
• Digital marketing social media, e.g., a Facebook page again promoting your pharmacy, the staff, and the different services it offers. 
• Traditional marketing e.g., billboards, posters, leaflets, and magazine articles.
• Wearable products e.g., clothing and jewellery.

Successful customer engagement goes beyond a customer's initial transaction. The goal is to deliver relevant content through marketing and engagement campaigns that encourage repeat customer interactions. By extending the customer experience beyond a purchase, successful customer engagement fosters loyal customer relationships, attracts new customers, increases revenue, improves both customer and staff satisfaction, and even helps companies better anticipate customer expectations and needs.

The conventional ‘commodity type’ pharmacy is now slowly evolving as community pharmacies are offering added health services such as but not limited to clinical services, vaccination, online selling, and counselling activities. Because of this they are faced with a new challenge of marketing these services to their customers. Developing the scenario of pharmacy engagement towards the customer via the delivery of healthcare services has changed the atmosphere in the community leading to enhanced customer devotion and improved loyalty to the pharmacy business.