The trouble with WISMO

“Where is my order,” aka “WISMO,”

is the one customer-driven activity that adds more labor cost to a pharmacy operation than any other activity.

Depending on the type of medication and reimbursement methodology, the time to answer this question could take anywhere from a few seconds to a few days and could involve multiple customer- and patient-service representatives. Effectively answering WISMO can determine a patient's customer experience at that specific pharmacy being positive or not-so-positive.

The pharmacy business is not alone in its struggle to provide outstanding customer service. Any business's ability to quickly and accurately answer customer questions determines how it’s perceived, rated, and compared to competitors.

There have been many innovations adopted over the years to improve customer service operations such as Call Center as a Service (CCaS) or Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR). But nothing compares to the disruptive potential promised through the next iteration of AI, AI agents, and its impact on the call center business and staffing model.

You have probably already experienced interacting with a chatbot interface. It may have been a good—or not so good—experience, but these bots and their programmers are evolving to serve the growing demand of higher quality—and faster—results.

Klarna, a Swedish financial services company, announced in 2025 that it had employed AI technology capable of doing the work of 700 customer service workers.

As of February 2025, Ikea's AI chatbot “Billie” has become an integral part of the company's customer service strategy. Billie has been successfully handling a significant portion of customer inquiries. Since its launch in 2021, Billie has managed 47% of customer queries to Ikea's call centers. The chatbot's efficiency has allowed Ikea to retrain 8,500 call center workers as interior design advisors, enhancing the company's service offerings and increasing overall sales.

Rapidly evolving from IVR to Interactive Voice Agents (IVAs) 

Think about what happens when you call a customer service department. A representative is listening to your question and is looking up the answer on a computer screen. What if the screen could listen? What if the screen could talk? We are in the early stages of this transition.

Companies like Klarna and Ikea have learned how to take voice recognition and voice generation technology and merge it with their core operating applications. It will not be long before the tech companies supplying the pharmacy business begin to take the same approach. In fact, it’s already happening in the entrepreneurial corners of the market.*

Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians are paying attention and are cautiously nervous

The site Will Robots Take My Job is becoming frequently visited by a variety of workers concerned about the onset of automation impacting their careers and jobs. Using its proprietary econometric model, the site “predicts” the percentage of any career/job exposure to replacement by AI/chatbots/automation.

The irony is that their algorithm provides a “calculated” percentage but compares it to a “visitor poll.” A unique aspect of the site is that the user polling widget is embedded within the results display, which quickly changes the percentages on the polled percentages over time as site users submit their “opinion.”

Like anything automated by a human, you need to take it with a grain of salt. But at least we have something that gives us a sense of how people are thinking and things are moving fast…

When asked will robots take the job of pharmacists its model predicts a 31% probability, but reports that users rate the probability at 70% (and likely to be different if you test it today based on user input.) For pharmacy technicians it’s 67% and 67% respectively. General customer service representatives are predicted at 79% and 81% respectively.

The next time you call customer service, think about the representative (aka human) at the other end of the call. They are probably reading from data on a computer screen. How long will it take for that screen to become as smart as the representative? Klarna and Ikea have made the jump and are having success so far.

It’s not all bad news

As mentioned, Ikea used the productivity gains from Billie to help 8,500 employees learn and deploy a higher set of interior design and problem-solving skills. The pharmacy industry faces a similar challenge: how to upskill the existing PSR's and CSR's to be able to provide greater value to a market that is straining under the ever-rising cost of healthcare.

As the population ages, more patients are being prescribed multiple medication regimens and need more complex pharmaceutical attention. We’re also seeing manufacturers introduce more and more complex specialty medicines. The onset of automated customer service agents may give us the opportunity to upskill the existing workforce to better manage the increasing complexity of pharmaceutical care in the very near future.

As automation becomes more effective and comprehensive, we need to advance our unique human qualities to provide and even higher level of customer service.

*Our goal is to bring leading edge companies deploying AI tools to automate and serve gaps in the pharmacy industry. Twice monthly, they present to our RxRoundtable Members at our Spotlight Company meetings. Here are some of these very cool companies who have presented to the RxRoundtable.