Head of External E-Commerce of the Digital & E-Commerce Department of the ANC pharmacy chain Orkhan Alizade spoke about working in conditions of uncertainty and the solutions that the chain found during the war during his speech at RAU EXPO 2024. RAU selected the main points from the speech.
Challenges to a full-scale invasion
The first challenge for the chain is the human factor. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, about 1,500 employees left, which is 20% of the staff. As a result, there were long queues in all regions of the country. Then the chain took a simple but effective step – they allowed pharmacies to open vacancies on the corporate resource. For example, employees of the chain who moved to another city could post their resumes.
The frontline cities had the most difficult situation. Because people literally risked their lives by working. The company took a forced step – they cut the salaries of office employees, and gave the money saved as additional motivation to people working in the frontline regions.
Another challenge is panic buying of drugs and speculation on vital drugs. Then, for the first time, the ANC network decided to sell a certain amount per person.
The next challenge is blackouts. When there is no power supply, the Internet does not work, the employee simply cannot find out the price of medicine, print a receipt or send it online.
Each employee has a "Plan B" for online and offline customers in the client application. This allows for service without power supply. In the morning, the employee finds their pharmacy and, using mobile Internet, downloads a file containing information about the assortment of this outlet and prices relevant during the day. When the power comes back on, the employee synchronizes the data and the receipts are sent to the tax office, they can be printed or sent to the client online.
If the orders are online, the employee sees them all at the selected pharmacy. By order number, he can find everything the client ordered, see whether it was paid or not.
Despite the fact that the network is adapted to blackouts, “Plan B” does not lose demand, because there are various force majeure circumstances, for example, the Internet goes down.
About the benefits of VTM
There are currently 12 million economically active people in the country – these are the people for whom retail competes. Due to the fact that there are simply few people, the struggle for customers is very intense.
In order to maintain sales, the ANC network has defined KVI – key product positions, based on which a person makes a decision on the pricing policy of the pharmacy. Secondly, they are developing VTM. That is, we go to the manufacturer and offer him to produce the same product that he was already producing, but now he will make it for our network under our brand. The manufacturer does not need to spend money on advertising, online promotion, etc., so the cost price of the product is reduced. This leads to the fact that we get the same product that the client bought, but its price is lower. We get a three-way benefit: the manufacturer gets its sales, the pharmacy network gets a more competitive price, the client saves, but the quality does not suffer.
However, there are risks. The first one is reputation. Now, it is not the manufacturer, but the chain that is responsible for the reputation of this product. If it is of poor quality, the claims are against us. Therefore, the ANC began to contact customers and ask them whether the quality of VTM products was satisfactory. If customers were dissatisfied, they asked the manufacturer to improve the quality. In most cases, they met halfway. Otherwise, we stopped cooperating with a certain manufacturer. Because it is better for us to refuse cooperation than to lose customer loyalty.
On the importance of improving service
We know that people don't like queues. That's why we've installed cameras at points with artificial intelligence that recognize queues.
There are three reasons why queues appear and how we solve them in our network:
- The employee is not at the cash register. We see in the system two people who are working, but only one is at the cash register. Then we automatically contact the manager of a certain pharmacy using a client bot and inform that there is a queue now and there is a need for two employees to be at the cash register and let people go.
- Everyone is at work, but there is a queue because there is a shortage of staff. We inform the retail department and they decide that more people are needed.
- Pharmacy throughput. We came up with likomats. When a customer places an online order, an employee collects it and places it in a cell. The customer pays in the app and presses open the cell. Our survey showed that 80% of customers who used the likomat once on their own will use it a second time without going to the cash register.
The ANC network also takes care of the client. If the client buys a product that has a specific dosage or contraindications, the employee will definitely tell them about it. If for some reason they forget to do this, we send a message to the messenger asking whether they told us about this drug at the checkout. If not, we provide the information.
Where to get footage
The pharmaceutical business has always had problems with a shortage of personnel, so the ANC network is recruiting students and has launched a corporate university.
