A New Commercial Engagement Market Evolution Has Started. Are You… Leave a comment
Undeniably, the life sciences commercial engagement model has changed, and the age of personalized customer experience is here. Most pharmaceutical companies have already begun planning or executing on improving their capabilities to address these new realities and subsequent needs. While many have shifted their commercial investment strategies towards balancing a high-level orchestration with scalability of business capability, only a handful of companies are on the right path to achieve success and a positive return on their investment.
Key challenges
As most current commercial ecosystems are not designed to support future needs, pharma companies have faced numerous challenges with their customer engagement ecosystem investments. Existing CRM solutions are very fragmented and overly customized, leading to higher internal costs for ongoing maintenance. Due to a lack of purpose-built capabilities, myriad sales and marketing tools have been added with suboptimal integration, resulting in siloed operations, more manual processes, and breakdowns in end-to-end delivery. These systematic deficiencies have slowed adjustments to business needs over time and/or contributed to resistance to making process changes.
Companies tend to lose focus of what truly matters to the customer, pushing ideas because a ‘system can’. Hence, most companies have struggled with
- Pulling through an outside-in perspective, understanding what engagement tactics drive value across products
- Connecting data sets across the commercial ecosystem, uncovering values and drivers to inform business decision making
- Understanding the most impactful channels in which to invest, based upon closed-loop customer feedback on preference as well as critical personalized insights
- Providing actionable insights tailored towards specific demand and desired customer journeys
- Driving consistent measurement to understand true impact and value against each customer engagement interaction type and their respective return on investment
- Providing business and infrastructure flexibility
Vision and goal
More stakeholders, more channels, and higher expectations require life science companies to take a smarter approach to customer engagement. This means meeting healthcare providers (HCP) on their terms with seamless, personalized engagements that fulfill changing needs and improve results.
Successful customer engagement needs to include:
- greater precision, speed, and scale
- real-time insights to improve decision making
- adjustment to HCPs’ rapidly changing needs
- leveraging of all available information to drive smarter customer engagement
These can only be achieved through consolidation of the fragmented technical landscape, enabling customer engagement ecosystems that support hyper-personalized customer experiences. Such pursuit of optimized engagement must include omnichannel orchestration with cohesive insight generation capabilities, bringing analytics contextually to the point of execution.
Client spotlight
A global leader in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics was looking to replace its outdated CRM application that was fragmented and expensive to maintain. The company’s expanding specialty therapeutics portfolio demanded coordination of multiple customer-facing functions as well as scientific and promotional engagement programs. The focus was to put the customer first in everything it does. It wanted a dynamic, integrated platform that delivered more deliberate and meaningful interactions with customers across all engagement channels. The shared vision was to create a connected commercial ecosystem that provided a comprehensive view into customer preferences and delivered intelligent omnichannel engagement.
IQVIA’s Orchestrated Customer Engagement (OCE) solution was selected for its
- specialty business model and purpose-built persona support
- Salesforce platform-differentiating capabilities, including absence of future technological debt compared to current solution
- strong joint collaboration partnership at every level and function within Salesforce to address critical needs and accelerate innovation
- strong roadmap and IQVIA’s willingness to be a true partner
Following an eight-week proof of concept, IQVIA has implemented, migrated, and integrated OCE into the customer’s complex ecosystem in just three months, seamlessly supporting all existing integrations (content, alignment tools, data management, samples, etc.).
Next steps
Companies that have not yet begun to adapt to more personalized customer experiences will undoubtedly face various degrees of disruption to their customer engagement solutions in the near term. Those organizations should use this time to prepare and adapt for the future.
When considering future technology investments, key drivers should include:
- Partnering with an innovative healthcare technology leader to uncover new insights for smarter decision making
- Improving the bottom line with a platform that leverages AI/ML to engage HCPs in a more contextually relevant way
- Promoting a team-selling model with seamless information sharing among all customer stakeholders
- Optimizing the customer journey with coordinated omnichannel engagement plans and real-time adaptation to changing HCP preferences
Comprehensive and flexible solutions lead to better orchestration, and more personalized and optimized engagements. IQVIA continues to invest in developing the most advanced technology portfolio in the life sciences industry, designed specifically to address its customers’ business challenges, by accelerating and democratizing forward innovation to drive the future of customer engagement.
