Customer Focus Means “Going Individual”
New solutions enable pharma to empower those closest to the customer to help deliver better outcomes, reveals Morten Hjelmsø.
To become more customer focused, life sciences organizations should become increasingly decentralized. There’s a need to empower people much closer to the actual customer along with the customers themselves, argues Morten Hjelmsø, CEO of technology company Agnitio and digital creative agency Anthill.
We should be addressing customer needs at a much more individual level. “It’s not about segmentation anymore; it’s really about ‘going individual’,” he explains. Today, the technology is available to help us achieve that.
Hjelmsø will be exploring these issues at eyeforpharma’s Multichannel Customer Experience conference in London on 19-20 October, where his presentation will focus on “Customer experience as an organizational design”.
“In the past we have behaved rather like answering machines, where everybody gets the same message,” he suggests. “Doctors and patients will each have their own specific questions but the answers are too standardized – often created months in advance. This necessarily involves a lot of second-guessing.
“From an HQ point of view, it’s hard to provide answers to questions that you haven’t yet heard. We’re like gamblers in a casino: sometimes we get lucky and deliver the right message to the right person, but mostly we lose. To remove the guesswork, we have to know the questions before we provide the answers.”
Digital and relevant
In order to be successful today, as an industry we need to be using communications processes that are both digital – to enable delivery of individual information – and relevant to individual customers, in a specific context, in real time. How is this done? “We can use social media to listen, to hear the questions and understand what worries patients; we can work with our colleagues in pharma on a local level to better understand and respond; and we can use the new and more agile digital channels to deliver more individualized information.
“Where we need to get to is a stage where individual healthcare professionals recognize that the personal attention we give him or her enables them to make better treatment decisions.” In fact, this applies to the whole range of potential customer and influencer groups, including doctors, pharmacists, patients and relatives.
Hjelmsø explains: “I may know as the patient that the drug is essential, but I also know there are a lot of other factors that have to play out correctly if I am to get the right outcome. I may know that you have the best drug in the world but, if the doctor doesn’t know how to diagnose or initiate or dose the treatment, it’s not going to work. Similarly, the pharmacist needs to know whether that drug is interacting with another treatment and, if I don’t understand when and how to take the drug, I’m never going to reach the outcome that is necessary.”
Hjelmsø stresses that this is where the health sector can make big gains in terms of outcomes. Although much recent talk has been about the cost of treatment, the “really huge potential lies in better treatment management.” He adds: “It’s not just about explaining what a drug can do but really helping out all the way through – helping patients to stay adherent, for instance. The patient will never be any more adherent than what the doctor can tell them, and the doctor can never tell the patient anything better than what the industry can tell him or her.”
Tailored but compliant
How can this new individually focused, tailored approach be cost effective and yet remain compliant? The answer lies in the relevance of what is delivered. In the past, we as an industry have understandably focused on scaling and centralizing as much as possible, in order to drive efficiency.
Now, however, the pendulum has swung towards thought-leaders asking: “How can we use technology to actually empower those people further down, closer to the customer?” Technology’s new role is to enable them to deliver – via any channel – what’s relevant and important for the individual customer right now, and to do this in a compliant way.
Accordingly, technology is used to bring together genuinely useful content rather than simply seeking to reduce printing and distribution costs, say. Its ultimate aim is to deliver a more tailored service.
Of course, there are potential compliance issues to be avoided. “You can’t have people making up their own marketing campaigns around features about the drug,” Hjelmsø acknowledges.
However, compliance is mainly concerned with what companies claim about a product; consequently, there is significant potential to provide valuable information to doctors around other issues, such as explaining why it is so important for a patient to take a certain type of drug before a meal, for example.
Hjelmsø reiterates his point that the current big gap is treatment management, where the drug itself is only part of the story. “We, as an industry, need to provide more than just a product sheet about the safety and efficacy of the drug. We’re going to have to starting giving more value in terms of service and deliver better outcomes.”
Dynamic system
Indeed, compliance can be built into the process. Hjelmsø’s envisions a system whereby individual reps – in tandem with other customer-facing channels – pick up on the questions currently concerning individual clients and then provide them with specific-but-compliant answers from a comprehensive, curated database. Constantly updated, the system is dynamic, to enable a feedback mechanism whereby market intelligence and previously unconsidered questions can also be captured on behalf of customers.
Customer focus means not being product driven, but treatment driven.
Moreover, because the system provides content options that help to enhance our relevance to customers – with a menu of medically-approved content to choose from – the conversation shifts away from general product discussions towards achieving satisfactory outcomes. In this way, marketers and company representatives can respond to the specific needs of individual customers.
This approach can be further enhanced with tools that provide assistance in screening, diagnosing or conveying complex information to patients. For instance, non-branded content may also be available for doctors to provide to their patients.
“Customer focus means not being product driven, but treatment driven,” Hjelmsø concludes. “This aligns the industry and our customers around working towards the same goals – better outcomes – and so brings with it a new kind of relationship.”