National Pharmacy Scales Voice AI for High-Volume Prescription Support

Overview

A large U.S. retail pharmacy chain manages more than one million pharmacy-related calls per day across over 7,000 store locations, where pharmacists and pharmacy teams balance patient care, prescription fulfillment, and time-sensitive service requests throughout the day. As call volumes continued to grow, routine inquiries increasingly pulled staff away from in-store responsibilities and direct patient interactions.

To address this challenge, the organization partnered with Kore.ai to deploy AI for Service with a voice-first automation strategy, using Kore.ai’s Voice Gateway as the orchestration layer. The goal was to automate high-frequency prescription interactions at massive scale, while preserving reliable pathways to human follow-up when exceptions arise. The result is one of the largest voice AI deployments in retail healthcare –built for accuracy, resiliency, and long-term evolution toward more intelligent, agentic service.

The Challenge

Many calls are urgent, repetitive, and highly sensitive to accuracy, creating constant interruptions that pull pharmacists and pharmacy teams away from patient care and prescription fulfillment.

Key pain points included:

• Extremely high call volumes distributed across thousands of retail locations
• The need to automate prescription support without introducing rigid “press-1, press-2” IVR friction
• Strict accuracy requirements for medical terminology, including complex drug names and varied pronunciations
• A service model where most interactions should be resolved through automation, with dependable fallback for exceptions
• High availability requirements, where service continuity must be maintained even during infrastructure or regional disruptions

The organization needed a solution that could operate reliably at national scale while maintaining trust, accuracy, and accessibility.

The Solution

The organization implemented AI for Service with Kore.ai to power a voice automation experience focused on prescription support across retail stores. Using Voice Gateway as the central orchestration layer, the solution was designed to handle scale and complexity while keeping the experience natural, focused, and low-friction for callers.

Core capabilities include:

• Voice Gateway orchestration to front-end calls and manage conversational flows at scale
• High-quality ASR and TTS optimized for pharmacy interactions, including support for English and Spanish and medical terminology handling
• Intelligent caller recognition using phone number context, with validation prompts like date of birth to validate patient identity
• Prescription-centric self-service workflows including refills and medication information (e.g., drug interactions) delivered through approved, compliant content paths
• Voicemail workflow for cases requiring pharmacist follow-up, allowing callers to leave messages that store teams can retrieve and process through existing store systems
• Customer-hosted architecture designed for high availability, including active redundancy so a single  environment can carry full traffic if needed

The implementation prioritized a focused set of high-value pharmacy journeys, while establishing a scalable voice foundation for  broader expansion over time.

Business Impact

With voice AI live in production, the organization established an enterprise-grade automation model capable of handling extremely high pharmacy call volumes at national scale. The deployment improves store-level efficiency, expands access to prescription support, and delivers the resiliency required for retail healthcare operations.

Key Results

• 7,000+ retail stores supported, with deployment continuing toward full national footprint
• 1M+ pharmacy-related calls handled per day across the retail network
• ~120 inbound calls per store per day on average, shifted to automated voice support
• Operating at a scale equivalent to hundreds of millions of calls annually

Operational Improvements

• Faster, more consistent prescription support through natural voice interactions, replacing rigid IVR navigation
• Improved accessibility for customers seeking quick refill and medication information
• Reduced time pressure on pharmacists and store teams by shifting routine calls to automation
• Higher confidence in voice interactions through strong speech recognition and medical-term handling
• Enterprise-grade resiliency, with architecture designed to maintain service continuity even during outages

Current State

• The voice assistant now serves as the primary entry point for targeted retail pharmacy call journeys
• Automation resolves the majority of routine interactions, with voicemail-based pharmacist follow-up for exceptions
• The platform provides a scalable foundation for expanding pharmacy and retail healthcare voice use cases over time

The Kore.ai Advantage

Kore.ai enabled the organization to operationalize voice AI at extreme scale. Using AI for Service and Voice Gateway, Kore.ai delivered a focused, prescription-centric voice experience that can handle massive call volumes distributed across thousands of locations-- while maintaining a clear path for exceptions and human follow-up when needed.

With a composable architecture and analytics-driven optimization, Kore.ai provides a future-ready foundation that allows the pharmacy to expand automation, improve containment, and evolve toward more intelligent, agentic voice experiences without disrupting live operations.