We’re dedicating an entire cycle of posts on our blog to the pharmaceutical sector: a huge, branched, and multi-faceted industry. And we’ve decided to do so at a time when, for this industry and many others, new opportunities for change have emerged, largely as a result of Digital Transformation, talking to you here about Customer Experience in pharmaceutical sector.
We started from the advantages and applications of Big Data in the pharmaceutical sector, because we aways start with data and always arrive at the individual, with whom we build a relationship, and an increasingly close and tailored dialog.
How fundamental is Customer Experience? Some data
Digital transformation is a revolution that goes beyond the pharmaceutical sector and has swept through all economic and productive sectors, spurring an unprecedented acceleration. Let’s say it very clearly: the centrality of the customer is a direct consequence of this paradigm shift triggered by digital.
And the absolute importance of Customer Experience is the result of all of this.
An importance that is demonstrated in a very clear way by this first statistic to keep in mind:
- Businesses that invest in improving the Customer Experience record, on average, an 80% increase in revenue (Source: forbes.com).
These statistics closely mirror this data, which is focused on the customer side of things:
- For 90% of people, the quality of customer service is one of the deciding factors in choosing to purchase products or services with a company (Source: Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Global State of Customer Care).
- 89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase with the same company after a satisfactory customer service experience (Source: Salesforce – State of the Connected Customer).
- 93% of consumers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that provide excellent customer service (Source: hubspot.com).
- Millennials are willing to pay up to 21% more to do business with companies that have smooth and efficient customer service processes (Source: customerthermometer.com).
Conversely:
- 89% of customers who left a company to switch to competitors did so primarily because of problems in the Customer Experience (Source: customerthermometer.com).
In conclusion, you’ll want to remember these last two figures, which have emerged from well-known research conducted by Bain & Company:
- For a company, winning a new customer costs 6 to 7 times more than retaining one.
- A 5% improvement in Customer Retention can produce up to 25% more profit.
These are eloquent statistics, which perfectly demonstrate how Customer Service is the main pillar of every company in the digital era. Now, as promised, we want to tighten the circle around the theme of Customer Experience in the pharmaceutical sector to understand how to improve it, with advantages both for patients and companies.
The topic is really broad, and we decided to address it by proposing a path in three steps and three themes: omnichannel, data-driven, one-to-one.
Omnichannel
Any good customer experience strategy in the pharmaceutical sector must be omnichannel.
Of course, you have to start with the “physical world”, that of doctors, pharmacies, and parapharmacies. But this aspect alone is no longer enough. And the agitated phase of the healthcare emergency has demonstrated this with great and dramatic evidence.
The key word is integration. Integration between traditional personal processes and the new digital processes, which must be personalized (and we will return to this at length in the following points).
But beware: the digital world is increasingly composite and multifaceted, both in terms of devices and platforms and communication channels. Where to start, then? Certainly from mobile.
Just think of these figures: today, 92.1% of users worldwide access the Internet via mobile devices (Source: datareportal.com). And “mobile” isn’t just about optimizing digital communication for smartphones. It’s also about focusing on the opportunities that open up with the creation and use of dedicated apps, which put companies in communication directly with their customers.
A concrete example is offered to us by Roche, which in 2017 acquired mySugr App, an application aimed at diabetic patients that exploits the most modern systems of engagement and interactive dialog with the patient, even implementing a gamification logic.
Data driven
There is no digital revolution without Big Data collection and analysis; we already mentioned this at the beginning. Now let’s push the envelope by asking a decisive question: what is the role of Big Data in improving the Customer Experience in the pharmaceutical sector?
An absolutely central role, and one that can be summarized as follows: collecting, analyzing, and interpreting as much data as possible is the tool that companies have at their disposal to get to know their audience better. And knowing who they are addressing is the best way to create effective communications.
But don’t make the mistake of limiting yourself to quantity. When it comes to data-driven, it’s more and more a question of the quality and depth of the information you can extract about your target audience. And where does one find this information? Practically everywhere.
All of us, all the time, leave a huge number of “digital traces” online. When we search on search engines, when we interact on social networks, when we make online purchases, when we subscribe, when we geolocate…but also when we make purchases in our trusted pharmacy.
So what should pharmaceutical companies, but also individual pharmacies, do? First of all: collect this information in all of the possible “digital places”. Then it’s a matter of putting things in order with appropriate, flexible, and scalable CRM systems that also guarantee maximum attention to security and privacy, a very delicate issue when it comes to the health of individuals.
The result of all of these operations is the emergence of a very detailed picture of one’s customer base. At this point comes the next and most important step: This “picture” must be “zoomed in” and broken down into as many segments as possible. It’s about abandoning the view of a static and standardized communication for each user and about dividing your target into many clusters of people who have characteristics, behaviors, needs, and possible desires in common.
Consequently, these micro-targets should be hit with specific and tailored operations and communications. This is what is called data-driven marketing.
It’s all about setting the right metrics, depending on your goals. And there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe: especially in a sector like pharma, which brings together such diverse players, from large multinationals to the family-run pharmacy.
However, there is one fact that applies to all, which we report here: digital companies that use customer experience systems based on user behavior and data-driven marketing increase their profits, on average, by 15% more than others (Source: gartner.com).
One-to-one
In the previous point, we talked about being data-driven and segmenting the target audience into many micro-targets. But can we go further? Today the answer is: yes. The answer is personalization.
The real turning point of the Customer Experience in the pharmaceutical sector is the possibility of establishing a one-to-one dialog with the individual customer. But how, in concrete terms? By exploiting the power of digital tools offered by companies specialized in offering products dedicated to improving communication with customers like Doxee.
An operational example?
Doxee Pvideo: personalized and interactive videos, built based on the characteristics of the individual recipients, and which adapt to the navigation choices. In this way, the dialog between company and client is made even more effective by exploiting the medium of video, the “king” of digital content, in terms of diffusion and its communicative power.
Here is the real revolution for the Customer Experience in the pharmaceutical sector: the transformation of data into relationships with individuals. Transparent, effective, close, and lasting relationships!