The Pharmaceutical Industry Needs a Customer-Centric Digital Transformation
Consumers accustomed to excellent customer experiences from online retailers are increasingly raising their technological expectations in all their business transactions. And the digital evolution driving that change is now leading to fundamental shifts in the way health care and pharmaceutical organizations conduct business.
Health care professionals increasingly look to pharmaceutical companies for high-level, non-promotional scientific content and engagement, and expect immediate access to digital resources and services. The Covid-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on the vital role that the medical affairs function plays within a pharmaceutical organization in a crisis.
The Medical Affairs Digital Strategy Council, sponsored by Indegene, helps medical affairs organizations embrace technology and innovation to unlock growth and maximize impact across internal and external engagements. “Our aim is to bring together leaders from the industry to evaluate practical applications of modern technology for increasing the efficiency of the organization, enhancing communication, and improving compliance,” says Sameer Lal, SVP, Indegene.
The Medical Affairs Digital Strategy Council has developed a white paper on how to improve the customer experience by embracing a customer-centric mindset driven by digital transformation.
The focus on personalization of health care delivery and characterization of individual patients means there is an increasing need to differentiate based on outcomes and to optimize care delivery. The paper sets out three core criteria for delivering a good customer experience and interaction in medical affairs:
Human-centered design
Individualization
Trust
Delivering Good Customer Experience—Critical Imperatives for Success
A critical first step in the planning process is gathering customer insights through research and data to answer the following questions: “Who are the customers? What defines them? What job are they trying to get done?” This data then informs the customer journey to help organizations understand the customer experience as customers actually experience it—a complete journey that cuts across multiple functions and channels.
Building effective cross-functional partnerships and breaking down traditional functional silos will enable medical affairs to be more impactful in working collaboratively with a common purpose to improve customer experience. As with any change-management program, endorsement from senior leadership is key to success and to fostering a culture of experimentation and exploration of ideas.
Alongside experimentation, there must be effective governance and respect for the guardrails that are essential in a regulated industry. Blending teams of traditional medical-scientific backgrounds with emerging skill sets in technology and data is an effective way of achieving this.
In addition to capabilities, investing in infrastructure is key. Focusing only on the front-end experience without changing the back-end operations that support it is unlikely to be sustainable.
Core to delivery is an omnichannel approach, which involves delivering a data-driven, customer-centric experience that flows seamlessly across channels and devices.
“A company must embed digital in its operations and ways of working, rather than bolting it on as a separate project or through a separate team,” says Mary Alice Dwyer, chair of the Medical Affairs Digital Strategy Council. “Embedding is the only way to change behavior in the organization.”
Establishing and reporting on metrics are of paramount importance for digital to be fully entrenched within an organization. An innovative and user-friendly approach to measure the health care professional’s experience is the Stupid, Dumb, Smart, Genius framework, which is a very simple assessment of whether the interaction enables the HCP to get the job done.
The white paper calls for immediate action to be taken to:
Change the mindset, to put the customer first.
Champion the necessary technological changes.
Challenge and evolve the regulations that don’t make sense for customers.
Never before has customer experience been so important for the pharmaceutical industry, and the Covid-19 crisis has shown how medical affairs is driving the digital transformation that is needed to steer pharma through disruption in the next new normal.
Download your copy of the white paper “FROM ASPIRATION TO ACTION—Embracing a customer-centric mindset in Medical Affairs through digital transformation” here.
The Pharmaceutical Industry Needs a Customer-Centric Digital Transformation
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