Q&A: Borrowing the Disney Touch for Better Pharmacy Customer Service | AAP 2025

Disney sets the gold standard for customer service, mastering how to charge more while still leaving guests eager to return. While pharmacies face different challenges, such as managing controlled substances, insurance barriers, and low reimbursement, there’s much to learn from Disney’s model, says Mark Garofoli, PharmD, MBA, BCGP, CPE, CTTS, clinical assistant professor and director of experiential learning at West Virginia University School of Pharmacy.

Q&A: Borrowing the Disney Touch for Better Pharmacy Service | AAP 2025 / Nikish H - stock.adobe.com

Pharmacy is, at its heart, a service profession. Garofoli emphasizes that personalized check-ins with patients can go much further than generic satisfaction surveys. Creating meaningful, consistent patient experiences can help foster loyalty and trust—just like the magic that keeps people coming back to Disney.

At the American Associated Pharmacies (AAP) Annual Conference, held April 10 to 12 in Austin, Texas, Drug Topics® sat down with Garofoli to discuss how Disney’s approach to customer service can be applied in a community pharmacy setting and what metrics or feedback methods can best evaluate the effectiveness of customer service initiatives.

READ MORE: Q&A: Balancing Patient Care, Compliance Amid Controlled Substance Challenges | AAP 2025

Drug Topics: How can Disney’s approach to customer service be applied in a community pharmacy setting?

Mark Garofoli, PharmD, MBA, BCGP, CPE, CTTS: Disney, the entire entourage, has pretty much mastered customer service. There's very few entities on this planet, present self included, that can charge more for something, and people might have a little gripe, but will pay it and then ask, “Can I do that again?” That's not something we experience in pharmacy often, at least maybe, if ever. They have really recreated the game. There's other organizations that certainly specialize in customer service, guest satisfaction, really mastering the entire ballpark overall, but pharmacy being in service, obviously, patient care is service, there's opportunities along the way too. Is everything going to seamlessly fit right in? Mickey Mouse is not dealing with controlled substances, at least that we know of. It certainly is different. I think that has to be appreciated, because that's usually when eyebrows start going, “Oh, come on.” But there's opportunities, of course.

Drug Topics: What metrics or feedback methods can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of customer service initiatives in a pharmacy setting?

Garofoli: We in pharmacy actually created the illustrious receipts with the surveys on them that if you don't rate 5, like a 4 is a 0, if not a negative 4. A 1 to 5 scale, it's only 5 there. In the big picture, there's a pain scale, your 7 is my 3, the other ones, 12, which doesn't even exist, is another person’s 2. For me to say that was 5, that was perfect for customer service, is like you really had to knock someone’s socks off. But that's my scale. That's not everyone's scale overall. You have to take them with a grain of salt. I'll use it to point out any opportunities, great, but there's excellence out there that might be different. I find it interesting that, we created the game, along with loyalty cards, we created a lot of things in pharmacy. We had a pharmacist create the 6 pack, for crying out loud. A lot of things within society.

It's really the feedback. The ideas is, being able to take those moments these days, label it like, “Hey, would you like some feedback?” That's more so for colleagues, then for patients. Is there a good time to talk about something in a quieter location whenever possible, of course, along the way. I think the wording out there is “Disneyland dads.” I think I now can identify as a Disney cruise dad, because good golly, when you go to a Disney establishment or one of the many parks, it's like you enter a whole new world, one of them called Disney World, of course. When they are literally in charge of your entire world on a ship, then it's game on. They have that, that's the customer version. There's also an institute that people could go to and learn more of the Disney way overall. I encourage folks to look into that if they're interested.

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