12 Sept 2026 · Telephone · Independent pharmacy · Owner
What the telephone really costs a pharmacy
Missed calls, team time on the telephone, uncaptured deliveries: three cost items rarely added together. Here is how we put figures on them, with which assumptions, and what the network data says.
The telephone is the first cost item of a pharmacy counter: every call interrupts a dispensing in progress, and out of hours it is simply lost. Yet almost no pharmacy knows what it costs. The voice assistant calculator was built to answer that question with visible, adjustable assumptions and dated network data.
1. The first cost item at the counter
A pharmacy receives on average a few dozen calls a day; the calculator starts from 80 (slider from 20 to 250). Most concern three questions — product availability, opening hours, the status of an order — and tie up a pharmacy technician at every ring. It is not the volume that costs, it is the interruption.
2. Counting missed calls
Unanswered rings, customers hanging up while on hold: the calculator assumes 20% of calls missed or abandoned by default (5 to 50%), of which 30% correspond to a lost sale — the customer orders elsewhere or does not come back. With an average counter basket of €32 and 300 opening days, the lost revenue is written: 80 × 0.20 × 0.30 × 32 × 300.
3. Team time on the telephone
Two cumulative hours a day for the whole team is the starting value (0.5 to 5 h). At the fully loaded hourly cost of a pharmacy technician, €18, that represents €10,800 per year — not counting the interrupted dispensing, which nobody can honestly quantify.
4. Uncaptured delivery, measured across the network
The delivery benchmarks come from real data of the Nexum network, January 2024 – June 2026, 160 pharmacies active for at least six months, as medians by volume tercile. A median partner pharmacy makes 3 deliveries a month (basket €44); the top tier makes 10 (€43); a large on-call pharmacy, 90, with up to €18,300 of monthly delivery revenue observed. The median is low, and we own it rather than bury it.
5. What a voice assistant changes
Across the network, more than 90% of calls are handled by the AI, 24 hours a day, and time spent on the telephone is divided by five — two figures that hold steady across four independent documents. The voice assistant queries the real stock, confirms availability instead of assuming it, takes a booking and transfers to the pharmacist whatever needs to be transferred. What is automated is the data entry — never the decision.
Frequently asked questions
▶ Are the default values those of my pharmacy?
No: they are starting points. Each slider can be set with the pharmacy’s own figures, and the result remains an indicative estimate.
▶ Where does the €18 hourly cost come from?
▶ Why is the delivery median so low?
Indicative estimate. Delivery benchmarks: real data of the Nexum network (Jan. 2024 – June 2026, pharmacies active for 6 months or more). Results vary depending on the pharmacy, the area and the team's involvement.
Let's see what Nexum would change in the pharmacy
A demonstration led by a pharmacist from the team, on the pharmacy's own call and order flows.