By Mervyn Ward, Senior Strategist, Kanga Health
Undeniably, realising omnichannel communication excellence is a challenge. Most pharmaceutical companies I have worked with exhibit desire and intent but fail to achieve consistent excellence across brands, customers, and countries.
In 2023, in my view, most pharma companies would benefit, at a minimum, by focusing on behaviour change, insight utilisation and customer experience in driving omnichannel engagement excellence.
The omnichannel concept places the customer at the heart of every interaction using three main principles:
- A deep understanding of a customer’s personal engagement preferences
- Automated technology enabling optimised interactions at key moments
- Impactful content turning these exchanges (face to face and virtually) into action
The transformation to omnichannel excellence in optimised and personalised customer engagements is an ongoing journey. Some companies have 5 years of learning and still pursue excellence; others are working hard to catch up.
In assessing a company’s omnichannel progress, I ask myself 6 questions, which may additionally help you assess your organisation’s progress.
Does your omnichannel program drive change in the business?
My view: Leading companies achieve 8/10; followers 4/10
The big difference, that I see, within leading companies is the drive from senior leaders to change the organisation. These companies have a clear growth mindset and ambition; a sponsored guiding team responsible to implement; with change management, funding, and resources to make the change happen. Too often I encounter well-meaning individuals trying to implement/run an omnichannel program without these key elements, and they are struggling to make the behaviour and business change stick.
Two organisational areas are key to focus change and a growth mindset upon:
- Those responsible (Marketing, Medical, Patient, P&MA, and Insight) for putting together the content, the journeys and constructing the experiences.
- Those responsible (Sales, Medical, Channels) for implementing and often initiating the customer journey.
Improvement Opportunities:
Assuming tech is in place, the focus should be on behaviour change within the key personnel above. Additionally, ensure individuals are supported by job descriptions and reward recognition that are aligned to corporate omnichannel goals.
Are you leveraging available technologies?
My view: Leading companies achieve ~7/10; followers are nearer ~4/10
Omnichannel is not a short-term project. If the right technology is not available/integrated now, a company is at least 5 years behind. Establishing omnichannel systems including integrated CRMs, global to local content management, content production centres and web and social media platforms and capability, requires strategic intent, budget and change management support. Integrated data from these systems helps drive omnichannel excellence. However, access to data and the cross functional capability to leverage this, is still often missing.
Even for those invested, in 2023 not all functionality is switched on or fully integrated. Sensibly, companies adopted pilots, or staged function releases, to manage the huge step changes required. Nevertheless, once the initial project is launched I often see companies stagnate, resulting in, for example, teams creating workarounds (of omnichannel principles) to deliver their tasks or worse still, customers being required to fill in data every time they join an event.
Improvement Opportunities:
Some companies have adopted automation or a ‘Next Best Action’ recommendation tool but are failing to leverage the opportunity. Capability improvements in getting from data to insights, onto actions, such as in automation and artificial intelligence, is a key enabler.
Does your capability training result in the requisite behaviour change to deliver excellence?
My view: Leaders ~ 7/10; followers struggle to get ~4/10
Omnichannel engagement requires new ways of working for all involved. COVID quickly drove all companies to offer virtual channels. Core team members were supported by basic, virtual training of varying depth and quality. This effort, in most cases, served the immediate burning platform but has failed to embed the behaviour change required.
I also see functions delivering omnichannel contributions, but in an isolated way. True omnichannel excellence requires a different way of thinking and cross-functional working to deliver positive customer experiences. Many team individuals fail to appreciate a “what’s in it for me?” benefit of the new ways of working, and so teams are falling back into old habits and ways of working.
Some companies have explored capability growth beyond online tuition. These pockets of “better” capability practice use live projects, mentoring, live classroom sessions and supportive coaching reviews, resulting in enhanced and embedded behaviour change.
“Covid helped drive isolated digital initiatives. Now it’s time to reset the way we work and embed omnichannel as a cross-functional way of working. Training is the start; execution, coaching and growth mindset are needed to make real steps.” Marius Hooft, Regional Training & Sales Lead, Boehringer Ingelheim
Improvement Opportunities:
Critically review your initial capability build and identify areas for improvement. Ensure that the capabilities are consistently implemented (including in recruitment). Beyond a solid capability-based training program it is pivotal that people managers are trained on how to coach their teams for growth, and in delivering this new mindset.
Are your customers getting the experience they wish for?
My view: Leaders ~5/10; followers ~2/10
Historically, pharma has treated customers poorly, with many stop-start customer journeys and no customer experience strategy. Today, pharma still rarely achieves the levels gained by FMCG companies, which is what we receive and then expect in our personal lives. Ask yourself, “Is what you deliver with your brand, day by day, interaction by interaction, an effortless experience for your customers?”
I have seen some brands create excellent experiences in country, however, I do not recall seeing consistent customer experiences being leveraged from global to local and back again, in a fluid and dynamic manner, across all brands and customers.
There are regulatory difficulties (e.g., reaching patients with a particular disease) and practical issues (e.g., rare diseases and small disparate audiences) often mentioned, but I have also seen brands innovatively overcoming these in many countries.
The challenge remains not just around well-articulated and segmented versions of customer journeys and their implementation, but also a need to focus our prioritised ‘micro-moments’, where you can impact patient outcomes and revenue the most.
“For me, the key is to completely stop grouping doctors based on their specialty and dig deeper into what triggers their interest, what motivates them to engage with pharma and what a positive experience means for them. Teams that are successful in delivering great experiences to their HCPs understand that these ‘personas’ will evolve in terms of channel and content preferences. This evolution only becomes feasible when teams regularly apply rapid experimentation on different ways to engage their HCPs and use the data of how their customers reacted, to improve their future engagements in every iteration. Ultimately, the teams become adaptable to their customer’s needs”
Jose Maria Guido Avila [Chema], Global Patient Experience Lead Respiratory, Sanofi Genzyme
Improvement Opportunities:
Critically evaluate your customer experiences, personas and journeys, ensuring they are research-based and focused on those micro-moments where you can most impact patient outcomes.
Is your data enabling you to nimbly improve your omnichannel performance?
My view: Leaders 6/10; followers 2/10
Pharma has spent $millions on databanks with variable success, driven primarily by 3 areas:
KPI Management: A KPI paradox currently exists in most companies. Dashboards are often established to report omnichannel data that is historically comparable to old ways of working, (i.e., understandable), thereby reinforcing volume behaviour and confusion on what is relevant for omnichannel. There is also often a massive global-to-local difference in what is reported and interpreted. Until KPIs help teams focus on driving the quality of customer engagement, omnichannel communication will continue to be a nice-to-say idea.
Effectiveness: Many companies still struggle with accurate content and channel tagging to create metadata that serves insight and personalisation needs effectively. Until easy access to a reliable integrated data set is achieved, meaningful, economical, artificial intelligent-led communication will remain a dream.
Efficiency: As an industry we are terrible at improving campaigns once launched, and it is not just our common complaint of regulatory processes that stops us making rapid changes. Data reporting is slow, identification of which content and channel is winning or failing is poor, and regular management review meetings (e.g., weekly or even monthly) are rarely prioritised. This contrasts sharply with the weekly ‘Plan, Act, Review’ approaches seen in FMCG.
Improvement Opportunities:
Improve understanding of how KPIs and data bring value between customer-facing teams and senior management; Initiate frequent integrated data reviews by using meaningful KPIs, customer feedback and insight development, resulting in speedy amendments.
Does your content model deliver content that your customer prefers, in the right format, and at the right micro-moment?
My view: Leaders >8/10; followers 2/10
Despite investments in global content libraries and regional content production houses, many companies still struggle to achieve their global-to-local content models, expected efficiencies and customer impact.
Good customer insight-based content that drives local engagement and action is still infrequent (as demonstrated by recent campaign award quality). I also rarely see content that enables customer-facing teams to easily deliver emotive dialogues and personalised content in a differentiating manner.
Cost efficiencies are frequently lost with ‘global campaign’ content recreated multiple times; detail aids rebuilt at exaggerated costs, ‘rogue’ production with flimsy excuses, and a lack of consistent tagging across a corporation often results in a subsequent local rework of material, as well as loss of insights.
Omnichannel is not just engaging our targeted medical customers, but should support all other customers (including patients) who engage with our content and channels. To date, I too often see isolated campaigns and interactions and rarely see a coordinated approach across customers at a specific touchpoint/micro-moment.
Improvement Opportunities:
Content driving emotive interactions; tagging behaviour; improving flexibility in content production for different channels; impactful omnichannel use of detail aids and screens.
To conclude, at the start of 2023 I believe there is still a long way to go before pharma companies can declare themselves excellent at omnichannel. A continual growth mindset with investment in customer experience and behaviour-changing capability will help steer companies to achieving excellence.
I would welcome your thoughts on my scoring system and where future challenges lie.
Download the scoring system to critically evaluate your own approach.
Are you attending Pharma23 in Barcelona?
Come and meet the Kanga team at booth 37 from 18th – 20th April, where we will be holding discussions on omnichannel strategy, customer experience excellence, and much more.
For more information, or to book a time to discuss your omnichannel strategy with one of our experts at Pharma23, please contact Beth Harcourt, Marketing Coordinator, at beth.harcourt@kangahealth.com.
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