The radical change to deliver patient- and customer-centric engagement
Part Three – Strategies for improving CX
How to improve the customer experience in today’s non-linear world
The role of a pharma / biotech marketer is becoming increasingly challenging due to a competitive industry environment and the complexity of serving diverse customers with different needs, expectations, and channel preferences. In the previous three chapters, we have outlined how pharma brand teams can respond to these challenges through generating deeper insights, driving innovation and delivering patient-centric outputs. Research conducted by Bain & Company suggests that almost half of all drug launches have underperformed in recent years and that successful launches ‘create broad customer advocacy via a superior customer experience’ (Natanek, Schlegel, Retterath, & Eliades, 2017). Consequently, our final chapter focuses on how pharma brand teams can deliver superior customer experiences (CXs). We recommend providing marketers with additional capability training and modifying their current strategies to adapt to today’s non-linear world of omnichannel marketing. Furthermore, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered a more rapid shift to digitalisation, a greater emphasis should be placed on capabilities in digital marketing. Marketers will need the capability to manage this shift to digital and constantly improve and adjust communications and measurement. Knowing what is working for each customer is more critical than ever before.
Improving CX: Challenges and solutions for pharma and biotech marketers
Challenge 1: Understanding what different types of customers exist – prioritising and segmenting customers based on their behaviours
In the pharma / biotech industry, customers may include healthcare providers (HCPs) / physicians, patients, caregivers, key opinion leaders (KOLs), legislators, pharmacists and payers. Within each of these customer types, individual customers behave differently based on a variety of factors, including personal preferences, country-specific healthcare systems, regulations and budget. Pharma brand teams are recognising the importance of segmenting these customers into groups based on their behaviours and creating customer personas for each group that they can use when developing marketing content for a specific customer segment.
Pharma brand teams now need to learn to better understand each customer segment’s behaviours and to prioritise specific customer segments so that commercial efforts are focused on these groups in the right scenarios (Grogan, Smith, & Forsyth, 2008).
Challenge 2: Understanding customer behaviour in the context of what factors most influence their behaviours (barriers / enablers)
Health behavioural models, such as the Health Belief Model, could be adapted to guide marketers on how to understand customer behaviours in pharma / biotech. The Health Belief Model can help identify the perceived enablers / barriers of a customer behaviour that the brand is trying to change or reinforce, such as getting a physician to prescribe a drug or a patient to adhere to their treatment. Perceived enablers are the potential benefits of a behaviour, whereas perceived barriers are the potential negative aspects associated with a behaviour.
Following this model, marketers should identify and clarify these enablers and barriers to focus their marketing efforts on reducing barriers ‘through reassurance, correction of misinformation, incentives and assistance’ (Glanz, Rimer, & Viswanath, 2008).
Challenge 3: Creating relevant, personalised marketing for customers that meets their needs and uses their preferred channels
Our interviews with consultants and industry professionals emphasised that the pharmaceutical industry is highly interested in personalising the CX, yet they currently lack the capabilities to fully deliver this. There is a need for pharma brand teams to learn how to target each specific customer segment with relevant content and through the channels that are appropriate to them, depending on their attitudes / behaviours, e.g., a customer that most values safety and prefers direct emails versus a customer that most values cost and prefers videos. Moreover, customers will require different messages depending on their current behaviour, e.g., a physician who is not yet aware of a new drug / brand versus a physician who is considering prescribing it. Relevant and personalised communication is not only essential for meeting customers’ high, customer-centric expectations, but this technique is also more effective than sending a generic message to each customer.
We suggest pharma brand teams could improve the CXs they deliver by exploring some of the following strategies:
- Using Big Data to create personalised marketing content: Big Data and predictive analytics / modelling could help pharma brand marketers predict the behaviour of customers, for example, by identifying trends between a physician writing a prescription and their marketing engagement (Sorokina, 2018). Such foresight could help create more successful, personalised digital experiences. It seems, however, that marketers are not yet confident in how to use and implement Big Data due to regulations that vary at the micro level across countries and jurisdictions. Tech specialists will need to be hired to analyse Big Data and to internally train / educate marketers on how to apply it.
- Creating more positive customer interactions: Bain & Company research revealed that most pharma companies focus their advocacy activities on KOLs, but there is ‘significant potential to increase launch success by designing and delivering a superior CX to physicians’ (Natanek, Schlegel, Retterath, & Eliades, 2017). Consequently, pharma brand teams could work towards creating more positive interactions with physicians and other customers, not only KOLs. For example, they could provide physicians with answers to medical questions more quickly, which could positively impact physicians’ prescribing behaviour and build their brand loyalty.
- Using omnichannel marketing to communicate with customers: Not only is there a current immediate need for digital marketing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but customers are also becoming more tech-savvy, especially as younger generations enter the industry / field. Thus, we suggest training pharma brand teams in omnichannel tactics to equip them for current and future marketing strategies. It is important to note that post-COVID-19, this does not mean communications should be solely digital or that digital is replacing field-facing teams. Instead, a blend of human and digital interactions will be required in which field-facing teams ‘orchestrate’ the customer journey (Ross, 2020). Moreover, it would be favourable to adopt a targeted approach, in which only the most appropriate channels are selected based on individual customers’ needs.
- Developing strategies and key performance indicator (KPI) models to assess CX: Companies will need to develop the right strategies and KPIs to help monitor and continuously improve the customer experience. For example, PwC suggests designing metrics around a return on experience (ROX) framework based on customer experience, in addition to traditional return on investment (ROI) metrics, to measure a company’s success (PwC, 2019). Leading pharma / biotech companies are also commissioning STEM to independently observe field-facing team interactions and score them. This identifies skill gaps in the selling / MSL engagement model and how well the strategy from headquarters is being translated and executed. Is your pharma / biotech company using this or a similar strategy to check its CX performance?
- Ensuring online marketing content is delivered to relevant customers: Ray Kingman, the CEO of Semcasting, a software company that provides an IP audience targeting solution to marketers across different industries, argues that ‘pharma and healthcare marketers can be effective online, if they focus on location rather than the individual patients’ (Kaplan, 2016). For example, by focusing on prescription drug distribution data for a specific trade area, marketers can gain valuable insights into where to allocate their marketing efforts. Since individual prescription data is not used, patient privacy is protected, and this method complies with regulations. During a new drug launch, prioritising online marketing to HCPs in areas where a high number of prescriptions are written for a competitor brand will be most valuable, since the market is large.
- Implementing social science and behaviour change models: It may be advantageous for pharma brand teams to consider using behaviour change theories when creating marketing content. For example, the Transtheoretical Model, also known as the “Stage of Change” model (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983), can be used to understand how a physician would transition through several stages before adopting a new prescription behaviour (Daramola, 2018). As outlined in the flow diagram below (using information from (Daramola, 2018)), a different marketing message would be required for each stage. Consequently, we would encourage pharma brand teams to determine a physician’s behavioural stage before communicating a marketing message with them, to ensure the message is appropriate for that particular stage. Behavioural models could also be applied to other areas, such as improving patient persistence / adherence and KOL engagement.
In today’s healthcare environment, what is the ideal training for a pharma marketer to receive?
To conclude, in today’s healthcare environment, there are four key areas we recommend that pharma brand teams explore and strengthen their capabilities in: generating better insights, driving innovation, becoming patient-centric, and creating excellent CXs. Given the outlined challenges and proposed solutions to improving CX in this report, as well as the insights we uncovered throughout this four-part series, we recommend training marketers in the following:
- Technical marketing training – pharma channels, creating messages and content, promotional effectiveness, managing agencies, techniques for analysis and insight, forecasting and how to innovate
- Advanced-level training – how to build a brand plan and create strategies, how to counter the competition, build a lifecycle plan, lead a cross-functional brand team, engage a field team and engage / influence and manage senior leadership teams
- Knowledge – external healthcare system and disease area knowledge, e.g., from attending a congress, and listening to top KOL speakers, as well as specific disease / product knowledge from the payer / prescriber / patient perspective
- Internal processes for planning, promotional materials, compliance, adverse events, company budget process
- Field role visits (sales, payer, MSL) – to learn how the marketing deliverables land with customers and the challenges these roles face
- Cross-functional collaboration – arrange for marketers to speak with other functional roles to deeply understand what they do and how it links to the marketing role, to encourage cross-functional working
- Behavioural models and how to apply them – team marketers to understand how the attitudes / values of HCPs will affect their prescription behaviour and how to take these into consideration when generating marketing content. Complex behaviour models are not a necessity. Marketers need to understand the basic concepts of drivers and barriers (from the Health Belief Model) and how to identify them to provide more targeted messages to HCPs. Behavioural segmentation is also beneficial
We are a team of industry experts, with services in planning, strategy, capability, launch, early commercialisation and transformation, so if you’d like to talk to us about training your pharma brand teams to deliver better CX, please do get in touch with us to discuss how we may help you.
References
Daramola, C. (2018, October 9). Social Science Behavior Change Models: The Key to More Targeted Messages. Retrieved from http://www.pharmexec.com/: http://www.pharmexec.com/social-science-behavior-change-models-key-more-targeted-messages
Glanz, K., Rimer, B. K., & Viswanath, K. (2008). Health Behaviour and Health Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Grogan, A., Smith, V., & Forsyth, J. (2008). Driving towards Marketing Excellence – Customer Insight. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/pharmaceuticals_and_medical_products/~/media/D6A8B28950A24C3BA9481C0A9EFAD32E.ashx
Kaplan, D. (2016, December 19). How Pharmaceutical Brands Are Using Location To Target Consumers. Retrieved from geomarketing.com: https://geomarketing.com/how-pharmaceutical-brands-are-using-location-to-target-consumers
Natanek, R., Schlegel, C., Retterath, M., & Eliades, G. (2017, September 6). How to Make Your Drug Launch a Success. Retrieved from https://www.bain.com/: https://www.bain.com/insights/how-to-make-your-drug-launch-a-success/
PwC. (2019). Global Consumer Insights Survey 2019: Healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Retrieved from pwc.com: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/healthcare/publications/return-on-experience-gcis.html
Ross, C. (2020, January – June). Three billboards on the road to multichannel. Communique 45, pp. 8-11.
Sorokina, T. (2018, September 27). How the Pharma Industry is Using Predictive Analytics for Brand Marketing Teams. Retrieved from Oracle Data Science Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/datascience/how-the-pharma-industry-is-using-predictive-analytics-for-brand-marketing-teams
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