You could say Nicholas Saraniti’s company has split personalities. From the inside, it looks like a growing corporation with high-tech systems and structures. But looking in on Commcare Pharmacy from a customer’s perspective, it seems like the same small company it’s always been.
That balance is intentional, and Saraniti’s challenge as CEO is maintaining it so customers can’t see the difference between 2005 revenue of $7.3 million and 2008 revenue of $56.7 million.
“It does you no good to bring on an extra couple million dollars’ worth of business if you can’t continue to provide service at the same level you do today,” says Saraniti, who leads 60 employees at the pharmacy. “You will hurt yourselves in the long run by not providing the high level of service that your clients have come to depend upon.”
Smart Business spoke to Saraniti about balancing the internal structures that growth brings with the personal service only a small company can provide.
Serve like a small company. From your clients’ perspective, they tend to like that small mom-and-pop, family-owned business feel. They think they get better service. People know their names; they put a face on the business. Maintaining that as you grow and expand is probably the most difficult thing we do.
So internally, you’ve added all these controls and you have policy and procedure and regulation that govern how you do certain things. But from the outside, you don’t want it to look like that. You don’t want to look like a big corporate Microsoft. You want to look like the family drugstore on the corner to your customers.
First of all, we give them a dedicated internal contact here. So they have a troubleshooter that works for them inside the pharmacy and they help them navigate the entire process from beginning to end.
Anytime I have a meeting with my staff, I always remind them that in our personal lives, we’ve all been on the other side of health care, and it was horrible, and we were treated like children and nobody told us anything that was going on. We don’t ever want one of our customers leaving here feeling that way, and we reinforce that continuously.
It means maybe making your (corporation) more transparent so your customers aren’t involved in any of the bureaucracy that comes along with that. Here we use a lot of technology to make that happen.
So maybe up on their computer screen when [employees] type in a patient’s name, it pops up all the communication that’s occurred from anybody within our organization and that client within the last couple of months. If their birthday was last month, they could see that immediately and mention that to them. Keeping all that information readily available in one place enables my employees to build those personal relationships.
But one of the things we haven’t done — and we won’t do — is automate our phone system. You never call our business and get some sort of automated voice response attendant. I hate those. Everybody hates those. People use those because they don’t want to talk to their customers.
… We’ve chosen, instead of doing that, to hire more expensive and more employees to answer the phones by hand and physically take those phone calls. From a customer’s perspective, that’s a great thing because they get to talk to another human and explain their problems to another human, not leave it on a voice mail or have to press 16 digits every time they call us.