Is incompetence a "norm" in pharmacy service nowadays?

Sorry for the lack of updates to my blog recently. I have been spending literally too much time on Flickr and I think I might take a break from it soon =P It is kind of addictive, I mean in a good way because I have learnt so much by surfing through hundreds of photos everyday and I have met some brilliant photographers and great friends.

I feel compelled to complain something today to get it off my chest! We just updated our Point of Sale (POS) system in the pharmacy in hope that it will provide us with better inventory control and sales reports. And what did we get? A system that totally stuffed up our inventory during the conversion process, stocks level is out by miles and most of our sales figures are totally out of whack! According to our system, we have actually sold 350 boxes of Panadeine tablets (48) last month...what are we? A Chemist Warehouse? When we run into problems, the software company generally takes 2 - 3 days to response, and most of our queries/problems are tagged urgent response needed! I am not going to name and shame here just in case they get angry at us, then we might get no service at all in the future :)

Another thing that upsets me is the level of service offered by one of our pharmaceutical wholesaler, Sigma. They have appalling customer service and is getting worse by the day! On a typical phone call to their customer service, the average waiting time will be around 5-10 minutes and that's on a good day! "Your phone calls are important to us, please hold and our next available...." do I need to continue? :) Now they want us to pay $12 per month for the Pharmax ordering service that we don't use at all! We made numerous phone calls to query about the charge and to cancel it, we were directed back and forth at least 4 times between Perth and Melbourne customer services and no one seems to know what's going on. Then one of them said to us, that $12 is not the charge for the ordering service, it's the standard charge for using their customer service!! Pay while you wait for service...that's something new you don't hear everyday :) No wonder they are going broke, for your info, their share prices have plummeted more than 50% in the last 6 months! I wonder why.