Everything you always wanted to know about CX* (*but were afraid to ask)

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By Aaron Uydess, executive VP, customer experience at Intouch Solutions

 

So what is CX, anyway?

At its core, “Customer experience,” or CX, is shorthand for the relationship between a customer and a company, even if that company is removed from the point of sale. The CX relationship should stretch across all touchpoints both physical and virtual and all media in between. Today’s customers expect companies to know and understand them, creating a seamless experience across the entire customer-company relationship.

Is CX a new concept in marketing?

Not at all. Disney was creating great CX at its parks 40 years ago, providing memorable, emotional experiences that kept visitors coming back again and again. But marketers are thinking more deeply about CX today because customers are demanding products with great service, and cloud-based technologies are simplifying the foundation that’s required to deliver it. Companies that only provide great products won’t succeed when the bar has been set by CX superstars like Starbucks, Virgin Atlantic, Amazon, et cetera.

What might great CX look like in the HCP context?

An endocrinologist wakes up and does what we all do when we wake up – she checks her email. She sees and reads a pharma company email message (that has been A/B tested to ensure it attracts her attention) about the efficacy and safety of a particular brand. She clicks a link to learn more and spends four minutes engaging with the brand’s content. Later in the day, she encounters a sales rep from that company. That sales rep knows that the endocrinologist has been reading about his brand’s efficacy and offers additional information on cost and coverage, because the predictive analytics engine the rep uses in pre-call planning indicates the likelihood of success when orchestrating messages in that order. Later that night the endocrinologist performs a search and visits the website which is tailored to her on her tablet promoting patient support materials to compliment the messages from earlier in the day. Great CX would track and respond to that endocrinologist throughout her day, from the email in the morning to the sales rep in the afternoon to the MOA videos she watches or the copay information she forwards to a patient in the evening. And great CX would adapt immediately to that endocrinologist’s actions at every touchpoint, anticipating her needs while driving the brand’s business goals.

Is all that really happening yet?

No, because there’s still too much lag between the data feeds, and, as an industry, we are still in the infancy of figuring out how to utilize them in a timely fashion. Companies are beginning to invest in the infrastructure necessary to make real-time CX adaptation a reality, but no one has quite gotten to that finish line.

So how can my company get there?

Getting to great CX is not an overnight proposition, especially with large pharma companies who are traditionally slow to change. The best path to get there is via many small steps that quickly build upon one another while showcasing value to the organization. No one is going to get to full Disney or Starbucks right away. So figure out where the goals of your brand and the needs of your customer overlap, and where the lowest-cost/highest impact opportunities are within that overlap, and start there. Think of it like fishing. Let’s say you have one day to catch the maximum number of fish. You could fish in any one of a hundred different places. The first step to great CX is about finding where the most fish are, and the best lures to catch them. It’s not just where you might catch some fish. It’s where you’ll get the most fish for your time. Some of those places where you might fish are going to match your business goals. Some will meet customer needs and expectations. You have to find the three or four fishing spots that will maximize both.

All this sounds complicated. Am I going to have to spend lots of time and/or money on custom technology and/or software?

No. Successful companies in this space are those that spend more time in the marketing of things instead of the building of things. Newer cloud based solutions allow for quick setup and deployment if marketers can restrict themselves to configuration over customization. Building platforms does not drive business … using them does. The quicker you can take advantage of such platforms, the quicker you can drive revenue from your customer experiences. These cloud based technology platforms like Adobe and Sales Force are making it easier for marketers to create seamless and orchestrated experiences quickly and efficiently.

Really? CX doesn’t mean all sorts of complicated proprietary platforms and tools?

No. Keep it simple. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park – Just because you can create a certain customer experience with certain segments doesn’t mean you should. The simpler your tactic is, the easier it’ll be to manage, the lower the costs will be, and the easier it’ll be to track and optimize and adjust. Too many marketers make the CX mistake of making their tactics too complicated because they think they’ll feel more valuable or sophisticated. What they end up doing is building statues of their brand or campaign versus their original goal of establishing a customer focused experience. Keep it simple … simple to build and simple for your customer.

How do I know what tactics to use, and whether they are working?

All marketers claim to “know their customer,” but good CX requires knowing your customer at a whole new level. Who are they, where are they, what do they need/want from you? What are the right segments, and how do you determine them? What are the right channels, and how do you determine them? Figuring out the answers to those questions requires data, and data science, and lots of both. Set aside whatever preconceptions you might have about your customers – go out and do primary and secondary research, analyze activity data, use predictive analytics engines. The fish might not be where they were last week, or yesterday, and their favorite lures may have changed – but if you don’t know about it, you’ll be fishing in the wrong place and in the wrong way.

As for whether they are working, test and optimize! Too many marketers have the Ron Popeil mindset – “Set it and forget it.” But the research shouldn’t stop when a tactic starts. In my experience, ongoing optimization can improve the return on even the most effective tactics by 10 to 20 percent. Don’t ever allow any tactic to become static, because your customers are never static.

And what about patients?

All this applies just as much to patients as it does to HCPs, though the approach to patients is a little different. For example, let’s say you are running a TV campaign. Your TV campaign is going to lead to spikes in search traffic. What is the best way to optimize your paid search investment as it relates to the metropolitan areas where you might be running those TV ads so you can yield the highest possible level of patient awareness and acquisition per dollar invested? Those are the terms in which CX marketers must think.

What else do I need to know?

Don’t forget the Airline Paradox. What’s the Airline Paradox? Today you can buy an airline ticket from anywhere, you can check in and get your boarding pass from home, you can use your phone as a boarding pass, if your flight is delayed the airline will send you a text message, the airports have restaurants and WiFi and phone chargers, and on and on. Airlines are more customer-oriented and transparent than they’ve ever been, with the cheapest flights on record – and yet they are even more hated than they’ve ever been. Why? Because they’ve set up an expectation with one side of their CX that the other side – the actual in-person flight experience – couldn’t fulfill. All that transparency just makes the customer that much more irritated when he gets on the plane and finds out that his TV screen doesn’t work, the WiFi is out, or he’s been relegated to boarding group four. So be careful about the expectations you set with your customers. Or, put a slightly different way: In CX, yesterday’s good is just not good enough anymore. Customers don’t remember yesterday … they only remember today and what they want tomorrow.

I’m a little nervous.

You should be. Executing good CX is challenging. But you don’t have a choice, because your competition is already ahead of you. medadnews