Headwinds loom for pharma web strategy

We’ve come a long way since pharma’s websites were “best viewed with Netscape Navigator 1.0” and the web designs that were prevalent way back in the mid-1990s would hurt modern eyes with their lack of sophistication.

Nonetheless, how to best respond to what 30 years ago was still the world wide web remains a question that has yet to be wholly answered. The industry has some pressing new challenges to face in the web space, but many companies also have yet to confront some legacy issues.

Preeminent among these are the huge variety and number of websites that most pharma companies still have. Within a single company these might be in the high hundreds, or even the low thousands, many of which may not be known about at a central level or have no clear strategic intent. Without some serious review or consolidation, this causes significant problems of efficiency, not to mention the negative end-user experiences most of our benchmarks are showing.

Charting a course for ongoing omnichannel excellence

The early sailors that steered their way around the Mediterranean would often do so by staying in sight of land. In this way they felt they could move most safety, but by staying within their comfort zone they also limited how far they could travel.

New approaches, like the development and refinement of celestial navigation, broadened travellers’ horizons, and then tools such as the compass – and ultimately modern ‘technology’ – allowed them to visit new and wonderous lands.

The pharmaceutical industry’s own journeys in customer engagement can similarly sometimes look as if they reside too securely within their comfort zones, limiting the success of its own engagement strategies. But, with the basics in place (see creating the right foundations for omnichannel success), new discoveries are waiting to be made by those companies that are set up to succeed with omnichannel customer engagement.

How pharma’s sales and marketing teams are starting to use AI

This summer a fully AI-generated drug entered phase II clinical trials for the first time, as Hong Kong-based biotech Insilico Medicine broke new barriers with its potential treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).

The milestone is emblematic of the AI focus in life sciences, which to-date has heavily skewed towards applying the technology across its research and development operations.

Making the drug discovery process quicker, and more effective in terms of patient outcomes, is a logical target, given the huge investments pharma and biotech companies make there. For companies like Insilico and some of their peers the focus is also one that’s paying off, with years shaved off traditional research timelines.

But, while it looks like there will be no shortage of AI progress for pharma and biotech R&D, the sector has had less experience with applying the technology within its commercial organisations. Now, with the rapid ascent of generative AI tools, this year is poised to be the turning point for commercial pharma organisations and artificial intelligence.

Creating the right foundations for omnichannel success

Much like with ‘patient-centricity’, the overuse of ‘omnichannel’ in pharma is in danger of tarnishing the term. This would obscure the golden truth that resides at its core – that is, the way it can address pharma’s pressing need to better understand its customers’ needs and how best to meet them through a connected set of channels.

As the industry continues with the ongoing period of adjustment that characterises any omnichannel journey, one of the strongest indicators of how individual companies are performing is through the lens of the customer experience (CX) they provide. After all, if a company doesn’t shine when engaging its stakeholders, it is unlikely to find itself meeting their needs, let alone exceeding them. Currently, pharma is some way away from provide excellent customer experiences.

For its interactions with HCPs our CX research shows the industry provides what we’d consider a good, though distinctly average, level of customer experiences. Within that, digital channels as a whole lag behind their non-digital counterparts and HCPs highlight a multitude of content gaps when they talk about the information and services they want from the industry.

CX: How is pharma experienced in the US?

Pic: Ankit Dembla on Unsplash

As pharma moves along on its journey towards an omnichannel, CX-driven future, measuring the customer experience (CX) is a vital way of assessing its progress. Knowing the extent to which stakeholders are delighted by their engagement with the industry provides a solid understanding of how different types of content, and the channels through which they’re delivered, are performing.

But our latest research shows the customer experience provided to HCPs in the US is approaching an inflection point, as unsustainable marketing investment choices face a looming reckoning. All too often pharmaceutical companies spend money on financing commercial activities for their own sake, and it’s unsustainable.

We’ve been tracking pharma’s progress in customer experience since 2017, using our Customer Experience Quotient^® (CXQ^®) to measure interactions between healthcare professionals (HCPs) and the pharmaceutical industry. These surveys see respondents asked about their two most-recent interactions with a pharma company and last year it was run for the first time on a global basis. Between July and September 6,270 HCPs in 14 countries rated a total of 12,540 recent experiences with a pharma company.

Webinar: HCP customer experience in pharma

On Wednesday 24 May I’ll be discussing recent DT Consulting research on how to best engage HCPs over digital and non-digital channels and what content experiences best connect with them.

We’ll look at what research on more than 6,200 HCP interactions reveals and talk about HCPs’ most pressing unmet needs, as well as sharing advice on how to take an omnichannel approach to CX planning and engagement.

• Register now for The State of HCP Customer Experience in Pharma webinar to hear more