Shadowing results

5 Results and data analysis

The first part of this chapter explains the results of each tool used in the project. The second part then describes the final results of this project, the ideal customer path with embedded development ideas formed from the data collected earlier in the project.

5.1 Results by tool

From this figure, special attention should be put to the time people have to wait at the till. Though on average time at the till was less than a minute, some customers had to wait over two minutes, which is considerably long time if compared to the average to- tal time of the visits which was little over three minutes. Waiting in queue is something nobody likes, so it should be cut to minimum.

People did not seem to wander around the pharmacy, but focused on the items

needed. The customers looked at an average 2,3 different shelves while their visit. The Figure 12 shows the exact spots where the shadowed customers stopped. This map is composed out of the customer path observations made on the floor plan sheets of the pharmacy demonstrated in Attachment 4.

In this map the color chart on the top of the page explains the colors representing the times a certain spot on the map is visited. For example, spots visited 5 or more times by the shadowed customers are shown in red. The maps shows that most visited shelves were Eye/ear products, Wound care, Creams, Allergy, Campaign and Pain kill- ers. In Figure 13, the number of customers visiting neighboring shelves has been ag- gregated by product groups. The most visited product groups were: Campaign/bonus offers, Medicinal creams & creams, Nose, flu & allergy, Eyes, ears & herbal supple- ments; Stomach; and Wound, feet & support products (7 customers stopping by each of them). Photo examples of these popular shelves are included in Attachment 5.

Figure 13. The number of customers visiting each shelf

Not everybody seemed to need service. One person turned down the help offered and 12 people out of 35 did not meet a pharmacist. Three of them left the pharmacy with- out buying anything. The importance of personal service was evident with these cus- tomers. They seemed to look around for something, one of them for over six minutes, and might have needed help, but the pharmacist was not taking contact with these cus- tomers. In two cases, the student-pharmacist on duty in the non-prescription side was close by, but a contact between the customer and the student-pharmacist was not cre- ated.

7 7 7 7 7 7

5 5 5

4

3 3 3 3 3

2

1 1 1

0

Nro. of Customers by Shelves

The other nine that did not encounter a pharmacist seemed to be familiar with the pharmacy and knew what they were looking for. They did not seem to be looking around or seek for help and their average time in the pharmacy was only 1 minute 11 seconds. The popular shelves with these independent customers were “Pain killers”

(four out of nine stopped here), “Stomach products” (2/9) and “Eye/Ear products”

(2/9). Especially painkillers are the kind of products that people are using often and may feel they do not need help with. This might be a false belief, since it is estimated that 150-200 persons yearly in Finland die because of side effects caused by painkillers (Karvonen & Helin-Salmivaara 2009).

The routes of the customers were compiled in to a heat map that shows the areas of the pharmacy where there is most “traffic”. In the heat map, shown in Figure 14 on the following page, the areas that most customers pass by are marked red, less visited areas with yellow and the least visited areas of the shop with green and blue. From the heat map it can be seen that the most frequently passed by shelves in the shop are the ones directly in front of the entrance. This will most likely not come as a surprise to the pharmacy, which is also apparent from the current shelf plan. The first shelf is stra- tegically used as the campaign shelf, where the products in offer are displayed. The sec- ond shelf that is after the till on the right in the picture displays seasonal top sellers such as flu medicines in the winter and allergy medicines in the summer.

What could be reconsidered, based on these finding, is the location of cosmetics in the pharmacy floor plan. The case pharmacy has wide selection of cosmetics and selling these high profit products should bring the pharmacy a steady money flow. As can be seen from the heat map, the typical customer routes do not go by the cosmetics de- partment. As cosmetics might not be the thing most of them came to look for from the pharmacy, this arrangement does not encourage to the important spontaneous pur- chases of cosmetics. To improve the customer flow through cosmetics department it should be located more centrally, so that most customers would have to go past by it.

Figure 14. Heat map of the customer routes in the pharmacy