Pharmaceutical companies stand at the crossroads of a transformative era. Traditional product-centric approaches, once the cornerstone of most of pharma’s commercial strategies, are rapidly becoming obsolete. With the imminent patent cliff threatening revenues (The Healthcare Technology Report), fewer blockbusters projected to hit the market (MM&M Online), and intensified competition (Fierce Pharma), companies recognize the need to put customers front and center. Delivering a superior customer experience can significantly differentiate market leaders from laggards. This transformation isn’t merely a trend but a strategic imperative and a profound opportunity to create more value for all stakeholders. Here’s how we can seize this moment and redefine customer experience across the entire pharma value chain.
It Starts with Defining the Customer
In pharma, the definition of “customer” is multifaceted. Unlike other industries where the customer is the end consumer, pharma faces a unique challenge in identifying its primary customer. Is it healthcare providers, patients, regulators, payers, other stakeholders, or perhaps all of them? The primary customer definition varies significantly depending on the context. Companies must navigate this complex web of stakeholders, each with unique needs, expectations, and roles in the ecosystem. Therefore, a successful transition from product-centric to customer-centric strategies demands a new approach to customer engagement—one focused on enhancing the customer experience by intimately understanding the customer and addressing their nuanced needs.
Core Tenets of Superior Customer Experience
Once we’ve clearly identified our customer, connecting with them authentically to optimize their experience with the company is crucial. This requires embracing the core tenets of customer experience to craft unique engagement journeys for each customer.
- Shift in Mindset: Customer experience is not new to pharma; however, with the traditional brand/product silos, customer experience still remains confined within the same product/brand silos. To create a genuinely differentiating experience, we need to break down the silos and elevate experience to the enterprise level. An enterprise is a sum of its portfolio brands. While there may be brand-specific strategies, from the customer’s perspective, in addition to the brand, they’re also interacting with the enterprise as a whole. Therefore, it’s imperative to think of customer experience holistically across all brands. Enterprise-level focus can organically leverage the halo from one brand to another and create a consistent and superior experience. This decoupling and shift in mindset is particularly relevant for multiproduct companies that engage with the same customer across different brands.
- Understanding the Customer: A product-centric approach typically aims to ramp up engagement by simply adding more touchpoints across channels rather than optimizing the experience. In contrast, a customer-centric approach aiming to enhance experience focuses on customer journeys rather than disparate touchpoints to deeply understand customers. Companies must adopt an “outside-in” approach to truly grasp what matters. For example, in the case of an HCP, this involves putting the HCP’s needs and experiences at the forefront rather than focusing solely on the brand plan. The objective is to gain a deep understanding of the pivotal moments in the HCP’s journey that influence their overall experience, positive or negative. If the experience was poor, understanding the root cause will help develop an action plan.
In a recent client engagement, we found that some of the top prescribers in the category weren’t prescribing the client’s drug. The company had categorized them as “skeptics,” averse to prescribing the drug class in general. However, upon probing with a series of “why” questions through personal and digital channels, the root cause was found to be lack of accessible, patient-friendly educational material about the drug and patients’ previous negative experiences with drug switches. With this information uncovered, immediate steps were taken to develop patient-friendly materials, conduct educational webinars, offer targeted patient support and counseling, and connect patients to other patients that had switched. Within months, these prescribers were welcoming reps, requesting samples, and prescribing the drug, as the client had displayed an intent to address a genuine pain point in their practices. Therefore, by identifying and addressing these pivotal moments, we can create authentically meaningful solutions for each physician and enhance their experience with the company and the brand. - Create an Engagement Ecosystem: An authentic customer focus is built on an engagement ecosystem of personal and non-personal channels, with clear understanding of the relative impact of each channel on customer experience. The emphasis should be on creating an “ecosystem” where each channel works in concert with others along with seamless information feedback loops to deliver enhanced customer experience. An engagement ecosystem should decentralize customer ownership where reps are no longer expected to be the ultimate owner of customer relationships. Headquarter roles managing other channels in the ecosystem can own parts of the customer journey. This approach redefines the role of the most expensive channel, i.e., sales reps, so that reps focus on activities that they can uniquely add value to—building trust and relationships by effectively managing customer journeys. Currently, reps handle many low-value tasks that other channels can absorb. Tasks such as basic product information, samples/brochures/promotional materials management, routine HCP enquiries, educational updates, administrative and routine follow-ups, etc., can be handled by lower-cost personnel or non-personal promotion. Thus, leveraging omnichannel strategically to manage customer journeys with reps as key “experience orchestrators” signals customer centricity. Additionally, a lot of contextual client intelligence lies with reps. Tech solutions should be leveraged to capture the invaluable, unstructured intelligence residing with reps and integrate it with intelligence gathered across other channels to create holistic customer views and journeys.
- Harmonization Trumps Optimization: The success of any engagement ecosystem depends on carefully crafted omnichannel strategies. While we inevitably lean towards omnichannel today, far too many commercial teams are stuck optimizing touchpoints and customer experiences within a channel. Harmonization suggests that we pay more attention to an individual’s behavioral evolution occurring throughout the engagement ecosystem rather than being fixated on the acute performance of a specific channel. Harmonization cultivates the sustained and cumulative effect of an omnichannel experience, whereas optimization subjugates the experience to the iterative and incremental retooling of a channel. This isn’t to say optimization isn’t important—rather it is simply overweighted relative to harmonization, which runs the risk of creating high-performance touchpoints within a dull, disconnected, ineffective experience.
- Create Customer-Centric Metrics: Finally, for any customer-centric strategy to succeed, success KPIs must shift from product metrics such as sales, product volumes, product adoption, etc., to more customer-centric metrics such as customer experience, customer satisfaction, and patient outcomes. While product metrics should remain within the performance calculus, they should be assessed in the context of customer metrics and the larger customer journey.
Strategic Execution
Strategic ExecutionMany companies falter when it comes to the execution of a customer-centric strategy. The transition from strategy to implementation requires a holistic approach:
- Break Down Silos: Cross-functional collaboration is essential. Sales, marketing, medical, and account teams must work together with a singular focus on creating a cohesive and unified customer experience.
- Cultural and Structural Transformation: Adopting a customer-centric mindset requires changes at all levels of the organization. This shift includes upskilling employees, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and realigning incentives to focus on customer outcomes rather than sales metrics. A cultural movement towards customer-centricity must be championed at all levels of the organization.
- Invest in Technology and Analytics: Advanced analytics and AI are table stakes for understanding customer journeys at scale and harmonizing omnichannel to deliver on the customer experience promise. Investing in technology, advanced data integration and management platforms, robust CRM systems, marketing automation tools, etc., is crucial for implementing these capabilities at scale.
- Co-Creation with Customers: Engaging customers in developing solutions ensures that their needs are met more accurately. Throughout the process, customers can be involved in participatory design sessions, pilot-testing prototypes, and iterative feedback loops to refine offerings.
Putting customers first isn’t just a theoretical idea, it’s a practical necessity. By fostering a customer-first mindset and prioritizing customer experience and satisfaction, pharma companies can drive sustainable growth and catalyze better outcomes for patients, HCPs, and other stakeholders.
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