How pharma can help deliver better experiences to health care providers today and following COVID-19
By David Geisinger, Life Sciences and Health Care Lead, Hux by Deloitte Digital
Pharmaceutical companies are no strangers to digital technology, either in the science that creates their products or in the business of bringing them to the people who prescribe them. As the use of digital-first experiences intensifies and the pharmaceutical industry is forced to evolve, companies will need to lean on their data and technologies in their engagement efforts to deliver elevated human experiences.
Consider this rather common occurrence in the industry: A pharmaceutical company, with one sales and marketing organization, may hold the reins of multiple brands. If the marketing efforts aren’t coordinated across the brands, the company may broadcast duplicative or even contradictory messages to the same people. A primary care physician may wonder why she’s getting an appeal for Drug X when she just answered that need yesterday by prescribing Drug Y—for the same indication—from the same manufacturer. How engaged would you expect a physician in that situation to feel?
As that scenario and others like it show, making contact with health care providers (HCPs) doesn’t guarantee that pharmaceutical companies are making a real connection with them. The goal should be to shift focus away from today’s click rate or email opening tally to focus on the engagement that is built with each HCP, across every touchpoint, over the years of a relationship. And tapping into the right data and technologies needed to help make this possible. These meaningful experiences are becoming more vital as new challenges and strains are put on our healthcare system in the wake of a global pandemic.
How to put connection into action
Pieces of technology don’t solve problems. People do, with the help of technology and processes. Following are some concrete steps pharmaceutical companies can take to help improve their experience strategies and create meaningful experiences for HCPs.
• Align organizations around the HCP. Engineers can make machines talk the same language. Making people talk the same language, and making them talk in the first place, is a leadership challenge.
Every business team that touches the HCP, or whose work depends on their response, needs to be on board with a common engagement strategy. And everyone must agree who owns each relationship. This can help to avoid having six drug brand teams from the same company bombard a physician with six redundant messages at once, or to make sure a physician doesn’t get an offer from one office for something they just bought from another.
• Get to know your HCPs. It’s often much easier to mesh with someone’s established habits than to try to induce new ones. Pharmaceutical companies who want to engage with health care providers should seek them out where their attention already resides, in both online and offline settings. For instance: What partner sites do your HCP’s frequent? What journals do they read? What social channels do they prefer for what purposes, and what are the most common threads or influencer users there? What conferences or professional events are important?
While marketers have communications, content and creative choices at their command, it’s important to remember that the health care providers’ choices drive the change. It isn’t enough to connect with them. Engagements need to be fine-tuned for health care providers to find value from the experiences provided to them every time.
• Listen to the data. Time, channel, recipient, message and promised value are each vital ingredients to a successful strategy—if even one of these is a misfire, the attempt at contact won’t bear fruit, and what’s worse, the health care provider’s receptiveness to future brand appeals can erode.
The focus here is on each individual HCP and maintaining a thoughtful connection over the length of the relationship. The task to understand the HCP can be complicated as it involves data that’s coming from many sources, and it is usually living in silos. According to recent research, companies have, on average, 28 different data sources used for generating customer insights and customer engagement. Also, a Director of Marketing Operations at a life sciences company stated, “We know exactly where the data is and how to get it. I think the biggest challenge at this point is linking the data together.”
Data is needed to deliver unique and personalized human experiences at scale – to tens, hundreds, thousands of health care providers at every interaction. A single view of the HCP should be created by ingesting and integrating data across a variety of sources, channels and functions. A customer data platform can help with this activity. Then, decisioning via AI or machine learning can be conducted on the data to determine how and when to engage with each provider or prospect – these AI insights will help to improve audience targeting and personalize recommendations.
Worth the effort
Effective engagement with HCP’s is central to the future success of most pharmaceutical companies. It isn’t easy, and it takes not only a large effort but also a concerted one. When done correctly, companies will be reaching the right HCP’s, gaining more customers, growing the value of existing customers and increasing revenues.]
So, turn the lens around and ask yourself a simple question: How would you like to be spoken to? When, why, and through what channel? The tools that go into researching the answers can be technology-driven, but it’s ultimately a human question.
When you accomplish this paradigm shift in your view of HCP’s choices can fall more easily into place. This shift will be even more critical as new experiences and behaviors become normal post-COVID. To find new customers or positively engage with existing customers, data and AI is needed to help pharmaceutical companies meet their needs at every interaction.
