In pharma, ‘digital’ is no longer merely a channel for tactical execution. It is at the core of both commercial and business planning.
Clinicians, healthcare professionals and administrators are engaging with both ‘digital’ and ‘tech’ as part of their day-to-day. Not only is this realm a key source of educational material, but a first source of information in an ever-changing medical landscape.
Until recently, pharma was considered as lagging significantly behind the consumer sector when it came to implementing technology and embedding digital within planning. The tides, however, are shifting. Pharma execs are looking to tighten their digital strategies and link them more closely with Health Care Professionals (HCP).
To do so, three strategies must be considered for optimising Digital CRM to deliver more impactful marketing, leading to real returns for your business: personalisation, targeted multi-channel marketing, and automated prospecting.
The first step is to understand how HCP’s actually interact with you. You need behavioural data from each touchpoint to build a picture of the various journeys your HCP’s have. This helps you see where digital solutions will deliver the greatest impact on engagement, subsequent loyalty and brand/product advocacy over time.
Once you have that holistic understanding, the second step, is to identify the optimisation of relevancy, in both timing and need, in the content delivery – introducing automation in the communication campaign tool, like in the Email Service Provider (ESP) or Education Training Platform for example.
Not only does this lead to improvements in experience and operational efficiency, but it also helps build your data bank, so you can continuously learn and refine.
The third step is to enable real-time communication and data sharing across the various touchpoints in the journey. It’s crucial to think in terms of the entire CRM lifecycle, not just a one-off campaign. After all, customer engagement happens in real-time.
For instance, “time poor” HCP’s will require to find whatever they need educationally (whether that be a product, or product value/usage etc.) in no more than 3 clicks. For example, this means your email programme and data systems should know customer histories and can offer personalised content on the “next interaction”, making it easier for people to self-serve (while empowering your call centre agents).
The final step is to use insight to go beyond real-time and into predictive CRM support. This involves using data from customer interactions to identify when people are likely to have optimal advocacy with either the product, programme or brand (ideally all three), so you can pre-empt queries and engage them on their channel of choice.
To deliver a fully connected customer experience, you have to learn how to quickly exceed expectations – both, efficiently and profitably across every channel. We know that a large % of HCP’s won’t do business with a company if they can’t use their preferred channel. HCP’s want effortless service experiences, especially around education and if you aren’t able to provide that, any “day one” advocacy will be lost.
Understanding all of the strategic CRM values gives you a significant viewpoint of the technology required.
The technological requirement designed to support ongoing optimisation and improvement of the service provided.
Complete linked up data customer journey tracking – these solutions enable Pharma organisations to visualise the sequence in which customer interactions take place across multiple touchpoints, and gain insight into which interactions and journeys are most effective.
By looking at your customer journey in criticisable detail, you can not only understand how your data needs to be joined together – but you can also spot any problems or gaps in your existing customer journey and rectify them.
When mapping your customer journey and looking at the data that needs to be connected, talk to people across departments to get their perspective. A face to face agent, for example, might be able to tell you that a HCP regularly ring and request information they’re unable to provide.
In Pharma, especially, CRM innovation and evolution is built on marginal gains at each step in this process, creating a centralised way of viewing data from across the customer lifecycle. Then you can map out the entire customer journey across touchpoints to see where you can improve and automate. This visibility also gives you more cost transparency, which ensures your innovation strategy is boosting profitability.
With this complete view, organisations can then optimise their communications to ensure that HCP have a more satisfying and simpler experience.
Get in touch to find out how Edit can help connect your customer journey.
