Key points
- Rising customer expectations are putting pressure on pharmacies to look beyond sales and profit, using a broader scorecard of customer, operational and financial KPIs.
- Customer growth, script volume and repeat visits are important indicators of whether a pharmacy is meeting expectations around convenience, trust and value.
- Higher customer spend is often driven by better advice, service and problem-solving, not aggressive selling or discounting.
- EBIT remains the most important measure of whether a pharmacy is balancing customer expectations, service quality, labour investment and profitability sustainably.
One of the challenges identified in the Pitcher Partners August 2026 Business Radar Report is that customer expectations are changing faster than many businesses can respond. While pharmacy owners often sense these changes anecdotally, the more successful operators measure them through specific operational and customer-focused KPIs.
The Business Radar Report found that 65% of Australian businesses have experienced increasing customer expectations over the past two years, with the greatest increases relating to speed of service, quality, value for money and the use of technology.
For pharmacy owners, the challenge is that customer expectations cannot be measured directly. Instead, they are observed through a combination of customer behaviour, operational performance and financial outcomes.
Customer expectations are rising
Business Radar report – key pressure points
What customers now expect: faster, better, more reliable and digitally enables service.
For pharmacy owners, these expectations need to be translated into measurable behaviours. Traditional financial and operational benchmarks can help, but they should be interpreted alongside direct customer-experience measures.
The pharmacies that consistently outperform industry averages are often those that monitor a broader scorecard than simply sales and profit. They recognise that customer expectations influence everything from prescription growth and front-of-shop purchases through to labour productivity and profitability.
Are your customers choosing your pharmacy more often?
Patient loyalty remains one of the clearest indicators of whether a pharmacy is meeting customer expectations.
If a pharmacy is achieving script growth above industry averages while retaining gross profit margins, it is generally a strong indication that customers perceive value beyond price.
Particularly important measures include:
- Script growth
- Customer number growth
- Repeat customer rates
- New patient acquisition
| Measure | Benchmark / result | Commentary |
| Script volume growth | Broadly stable in 2025; increased by 1.21% in 2026 for clients using the PharmaCFO reporting program. | Positive growth in script volume is encouraging, particularly given the disruption created by the continued increase in 60-day scripts. |
| Customer number growth | 1.08% in 2025 and 0.85% for the year ended 30 June 2026 for the same PharmaCFO client base. | Customer number growth provides a clearer view of whether a pharmacy is attracting and retaining customers, because script volume alone is now distorted by 60-day dispensing. |
| Overall explanation | Both script and customer growth remained positive, but modest in 2026. | This indicates that achieving growth in the current environment is challenging. The impact of 60-day scripts, reduced visit frequency and cost-of-living pressure means pharmacy owners need to measure customer behaviour more broadly than script count alone. |
The key point for pharmacy owners is that customer growth should not be judged by any single metric. Script numbers remain useful, but the introduction of 60-day dispensing means they need to be interpreted alongside customer numbers, transaction values and service engagement. A pharmacy that is holding or growing customer numbers in this environment is likely demonstrating a level of relevance, convenience and trust that is valued by its patients.
How much are customers buying?
An alternate but complimentary measure to consider in the current environment of limited customer growth is how much the customer is spending with you when they do visit.
The concept of customer spend has changed over the past 5 years in particular as the advent of customer and Government (State & Federal) funded services intersect the customer’s journey through pharmacy.
Based on the Pitcher Partners client base averages, the average transaction (excluding service income) is approximately $54.24 per customer which is an increase of 7% year on year.
Many owners assume higher transaction volumes and value come from aggressive selling. In reality, the opposite is often true.
A customer presenting a prescription may also require other products to treat the cause/symptoms. When the pharmacy that takes time to provide holistic healthcare advice will generally achieve higher average customer spend than a pharmacy focused purely on dispensing – and the customer will be better off.
The higher sales are simply a by-product of solving more customer problems.
This aligns closely with the Business Radar finding that customers increasingly prioritise quality and expertise rather than simply price.
Capacity for customer service
The respondents to the Business Radar found that 75% of businesses are experiencing increased expectations around response times.
For pharmacies, this can be monitored through:
- Average prescription wait times
- Vaccination (or other) appointment availability
- Telephone answering performance (or abandoned calls)
- Customer queue lengths
Long wait times are increasingly inconsistent with customer expectations shaped by online healthcare and digital services.
While most pharmacies do not formally track customer wait times, several proxy measures are available.
| Benchmark measure | Industry benchmark |
| Scripts per trading hour | 24.4 |
| Items sold per labour hour | 10.8 |
| Sales per labour hour | $278 |
We generally see pharmacies that significantly underperform these productivity benchmarks experience:
- longer queues
- delayed prescription fulfilment
- reduced service capacity
- customer frustration
Conversely, pharmacies exceeding these benchmarks often have more efficient workflows and greater ability to respond to rising customer demands.
Are customers prepared to pay for value?
The Business Radar report found that while customers increasingly expect lower prices, most businesses continue to prioritise quality over participating in a race to the bottom. Fifty-six percent nominated quality as their primary competitive position.
Pharmacies consistently discounting to retain customers often experience margin compression without generating sustainable competitive advantage.
A pharmacy can often maintain stronger margins than a pharmacy competing solely on discounting, when it delivers:
- highly trained staff
- medication adherence support
- clinical expertise
The benchmark gross profit per script therefore becomes a useful indicator of whether management is successfully communicating value. This can equally be influenced by the type of customer in the pharmacy (e.g. safety net, general, private script etc).
As we have written about previously, some of our most profitable pharmacies have invested in and implemented automated workflows in order to manage the customer journey and reduce friction points.
A well-designed pharmacy operating model may include:
- automated dispensing systems
- workflow management software
- digital prescription handling
- vaccine booking platforms
- customer communication tools
Importantly, the goal is not reducing staff.
A pharmacy generating higher sales per labour hour often has pharmacists spending less time on administration and more time providing advice.
That is exactly where customers perceive value.
The most important KPI is EBIT
Ultimately, the Business Radar report highlights the tension between rising customer expectations and profitability. Forty-five percent of businesses reported margin pressure as the greatest consequence of changing customer expectations.²
On average pharmacies generated an EBIT margin of 10.2%.
This may be the single best measure of whether a pharmacy is successfully balancing:
- customer expectations
- labour investment
- service quality
- pricing discipline
- technology investment
A pharmacy with exceptional customer satisfaction but poor profitability is not sustainable.
Equally, a highly profitable pharmacy experiencing declining script numbers and customer engagement may be facing future challenges.
If your pharmacy could achieve both:
- 1% growth in customer numbers, and
- 1% growth in script volume
The profit impact could be as follows depending on your overall turnover based on the Pitcher Partner Pharmacy Averages.
| Turnover Band | Profit from 1% Customer Growth | Additional Profit from 1% Script Growth | Total Net Profit Increase |
| <$2.5m | $2,272 | $1,929 | $4,201 |
| $2.5m – $4.0 | $2,699 | $2,002 | $4,701 |
| >$4.0m | $7,150 | $5,093 | $12,243 |
Whilst one or the other is positive, the most successful pharmacies are those that achieve both.
They meet rising expectations (customer growth) while maintaining commercial discipline (capture script volume and retail sales opportunities).
In summary, every benchmark should be viewed through a customer lens.
Customer numbers measure loyalty. Professional services measure trust. Scripts per hour measure convenience. Retail sales measure engagement. EBIT measures whether the entire model is sustainable.
Together, they provide a practical scorecard for understanding whether a pharmacy is keeping pace with the expectations of today’s increasingly informed and highly mobile patients. The pharmacies that use the Pitcher Partners Pharma CFO reporting system know what these numbers are each month. They are by default, the better performing pharmacies when it comes to managing customer expectations while balancing the economics of running a pharmacy.
