By Barbara Stewart, Customer Experience (CX) Strategist
The pharmaceutical industry has long been known for complex product offerings and a high degree of regulation, which can make implementing successful marketing strategies challenging. However, customers increasingly expect seamless experiences across all touchpoints, and pharma companies need to embrace a truly customer-centric approach to thrive and better serve HCPs and patients.
In this article, we will explore how to use customer experience (CX) strategies to facilitate omnichannel marketing and create meaningful connections with customers. From defining objectives to measuring success, we will provide practical tips to help you create seamless customer-centric experiences.
The Challenge
The concept of omnichannel is certainly not new, but it is one most pharmaceutical organisations struggle to effectively deliver.
Let’s be honest, it is not easy to provide access to the necessary information and support services and tools across all relevant channels, platforms, and devices.
Companies that are succeeding, understand the power of knowing their customers’ behaviour drivers, and can identify important patterns, nuances, and the context behind their customer interactions. They will have started to adopt the necessary tools to gain these insights, take action to remove data silos, and be focused on optimising the experiences.
But let’s not beat ourselves up too quickly; the companies succeeding in omnichannel and CX are largely non-pharma organisations, with a greater number of customer interactions to interrogate. We can learn valuable lessons from other industries, and make inroads into creating excellent experiences for our customers.
What these successful companies do have is their customer at the heart of their business strategy, with an underlining trust that great CX leads to the best outcomes. All departments need to be aligned to this strategy across an organisation and believe in it (no lip service allowed). This is not a marketing activity: it cuts across all the silos that have been built up over many years and is foundational. This could be considered the biggest challenge and requires significant investment, cultural shift, and change management.
Creating great experiences for pharmaceutical customers in eight steps
Step one: Define your objectives
Defining objectives is crucial, as objectives directly impact patient outcomes and brand reputation. They will vary depending on the product and target audience, but they should always align with the company’s overall business goals.
Some common CX patient objectives may include:
- Improving adherence
- Elevating patient knowledge on managing a condition
- Increasing customer satisfaction
- Increasing customer loyalty
- Reducing time to diagnosis
Defining these objectives should be based upon deep insights founded in rich data, customer research, and analysis.
Step two: Create personas or profiles
Understanding your target audience by identifying customer goals, motivations and behaviours allows the creation of a strategy that resonates.
The creation of profiles/personas is an important first step that helps bring the customer into the room when creating content, tools, and services. This involves talking to customers and co-creating with them in a structured way. Co-creation with customers and stakeholders encourages loyalty to your brand because it creates ownership. Co-creation can also be enriched by utilising existing research and data.
To highlight the importance of co-creation with customers, a recent survey found that 81% of consumers said they believe brands are more authentic when they collaborate with their customers. A further 86% said brands are most trustworthy when engaging in co-creation[1].
Customer personas should not be filed and forgotten once the activity is completed but ‘lived and breathed’ by marketing teams and used frequently, as a benchmark for a better overall CX.
Step three: Develop a current state and future state customer journey map
It’s crucial to understand the touchpoints and interactions that customers have with your company/brand across all channels. The creation of customer journey maps for both HCPs and patients is a key step to understanding where pain points and moments of truth (marketing lingo for any opportunity a customer or potential customer has to form an impression about a company, brand, product, or service) can be identified. This helps a company be laser-focused on where they should place their efforts to elevate CX.
Involving customers in this process is a non-negotiable option if real and deep insights are to be revealed. It’s not just another interview where people tell you what they want you to hear; it’s the co-creation of the solution using ethnographic research that takes more thought and time, but pays dividends.
Step four: Watch out for the handover moments
To ensure seamless experiences it is crucial to pay attention to handover moments. These occur when the customer moves from one touchpoint to another, such as from a website to a phone call or from social media to a form. These handovers can be critical for ensuring a consistent and positive experience, and it is essential to eliminate any points of friction or pain that might occur during these transitions. To avoid this, systems and processes should be integrated, and these handover points should be closely identified and monitored. Some you may not own as a business.
Where friction is anticipated, act early. For example, if a common (yet unexpected) page drop-off is first noticed, the issue should be investigated, and rectified. Being nimble may not be easy, but it is essential, as is acting on customer feedback.
Step five: Create valued content with a single consistent voice
Content that is written in a consistent voice throughout the customer journey gives customers the confidence that they are dealing with one organisation. An example of brand voice would be if a company used a friendly, informal tone in its marketing materials. This would help to create a warm and approachable image for the company. Alignment in the brand voice across all touchpoints, including websites, social media and email, is required to achieve this. Another example of brand voice would be if a company used a more formal, professional tone.
Content should be tailored to each stage in the customer journey, their information needs, and their preferred communication channels. To achieve this, collaboration with different teams across your organisation is a necessity. By creating content with a single voice and delivering personalised and engaging CX, trust is built, and long-term loyalty is fostered.
Step six: Utilise an integrated technology infrastructure
Technology infrastructure needs to be in place and the different components integrated so they talk to each other. This includes a customer relationship management (CRM) system, marketing automation tools, and other systems to manage customer data and communications.
It is important that access to the data via dashboards and reports is widely available to inform optimisation activities – ensuring the right level of information goes to the right people. For example, Commercial VPs do not need to see the website data in depth, just the sales figures against the objectives. On the other hand, a Brand Manager will want to understand in detail why their campaign (and tactics) are or are not working. By doing so, companies can leverage data to make informed decisions that improve CX and drive business results.
Step seven: Build CX competency
For omnichannel success, businesses must understand the benefits of – and know how to implement – best-in-class CX. Whilst part of understanding this is the knowledge and ability to use the tools effectively, it all ladders back to the customer journey and building services, tools, and content to address real customer needs.
Recruiting people with the right mindset and openness to learn cannot be understated. Whilst bringing in people from other industries can be a quick fix, don’t overlook the knowledge and experience of those within pharma. CX competency needs to be in everyone’s job descriptions, and effective onboarding and training should be core.
Step eight: Measurements and analysis
In step three we noted the importance of mapping the CX into your customer journey, which identify not only gaps and areas for improvement, but also opportunities. The next step is to analyse your metrics and put in place measurements such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), which assesses a customer’s overall satisfaction with a specific touchpoint or experience, and Patient Satisfaction (PSAT), which measures satisfaction specifically related to healthcare experiences.
Additionally, Customer Effort (CE) measures the ease with which customers can accomplish their goals during interactions with a company/brand, while Time to Value (TtV) measures how quickly customers perceive the value of a product or service.
To measure CSAT and PSAT, surveys can be conducted after a customer or patient has interacted with the company, such as after an HCP’s appointment, visiting a patient support website, or after receiving medication. These surveys can include questions about the customer’s or patient’s experience and level of satisfaction with the interaction.
CE can be measured by tracking the amount of effort a customer has to put in to achieve their desired outcome. This can be done through surveys or by analysing customer interactions across channels, and identifying areas where they may be encountering unnecessary hurdles or obstacles.
TtV can be measured by analysing the time it takes for customers to derive value from their interactions with the company. This can be tracked by monitoring the time it takes for a customer to receive medication after a prescription is written, or how long it takes for a customer to get answers to their questions.
Increasingly customer experience management (CEM) solutions are being utilised. For example, they can capture and measure website interactions, providing visibility of online experiences to enable optimisation. Whilst a CRM system tracks the company’s view of a customer, CEM focuses on the customer’s view of the company at specific touchpoints, both on and offline. This is largely used by FMCG, but we should expect to see it used in the pharmaceutical industry in the near future.
In summary, you cannot be truly omnichannel unless you put true customer centricity at the core of your approach, and trust in the fact that the best business outcomes are based on delivering great experiences. This must be built into the company’s values and be led from the top of the organisation.
Developing an effective CX strategy that is channel agnostic requires a deep understanding of customers’ behaviours, objectives, and pain points. There needs to be a firm commitment to delivering seamless experiences across the journeys of our customers. If we do this, we can hand-on-heart say that we are delivering on an omnichannel promise.
An omnichannel approach aims to enable customers to interact with an organisation in a convenient, intuitive, and personalised manner, regardless of the channel they use. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey and the ability to use data and technology to create a unified and consistent CX.
Organisations need to leverage data and analytics to gain insights into customer behaviour and preferences and use this information to optimise the CX across all channels and content, ensuring consistency in messaging, branding and customer service to build trust with customers. Ultimately, adopting a CX-driven omnichannel approach is critical for any business seeking to create seamless, personalised and memorable interactions that foster customer loyalty and drive growth.
References:
- The Power of Co-creation, Bulbshare (2018): https://resources.bulbshare.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Bulbshare-The-Power-of-Co-creation-2018-final-comp.pdf
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