As we go into 2020, nearly 70 percent of all healthcare providers are digital natives. Their personal experiences with mobile, social, and digital technologies are shifting their professional expectations. This could present a real challenge for the pharmaceutical industry, which falls behind all other major sectors in digital maturity, except for the public sector which still lags further behind.
A recent survey of healthcare providers by Across Health and Veeva, found that nearly 60 percent of their engagement came via a field rep. When compared to the amount of engagement that occurs using a combination of face-to-face, email, and virtual meeting channels (just eight percent in the U.S. and an even smaller six percent in Europe) the difference is stark.
New opportunities
For many leading companies, digital engagement is unlocking access to healthcare providers they had difficulty contacting just a few years ago.
Indeed, the technology now exists for all life sciences companies to enhance existing stakeholder engagement and re-claim relationships with HCPs. Many HCPs prefer to connect at a more convenient time remotely or digitally, allowing the company to extend overall reach and improve customer satisfaction.
New approaches
There is a clear argument for a blended approach to digital engagement, incorporating new channels into the existing field processes. Effective digital engagement does not replace the need for face-to-face interaction. Instead, the best digital engagement strategies complement face-to-face meetings. This makes it possible to communicate at a time more convenient for the customer, increasing customer satisfaction, and extending overall reach.
One global life sciences company performed a two-year test to measure the impact of digital channels in one of their emerging growth markets. The program involved three separate segments: reps engaging with HCPs using only face-to-face visits; reps engaging solely via digital; and a third group that combined face-to-face and digital interactions.
Reps using this digitally enabled hybrid approach improved cost efficiency by 80 percent, surpassing the combined sales growth of the two stand-alone segments by three percent. Best of all, HCPs are demanding it, with 66 percent wanting to receive emails from life sciences reps directly. This creates an opportunity for fast movers in pharma to realise significant gains by evolving their communications approach.
The value of meetings
Remote meetings complement existing face-to-face relationships to bridge geographic barriers, provide flexibility, and allow for more impactful conversations. They extend the usability of existing approved content, and the average duration of engagement is extended from six minutes (face-to-face) to 14 minutes (remote).
Events remain a critical channel for HCP education and engagement. In fact, this represents the second largest area of spending for pharma marketing and sales organizations today, at about USD 7 billion annually. Despite HCPs seeing more patients and dealing with more administrative burden than ever, the events channel continues to grow. Nearly all (96 percent) HCPs say they would benefit from attending more conferences, meetings, and CME events virtually.
Digital evolution
For most companies, successful digital engagement requires a significant amount of change management. A well-coordinated digital strategy ensures that the correct new processes are built, tested, and then standardized to help the organization scale. Evolution takes place incrementally, and for each company the pace and scale of change will differ depending on the current landscape, culture, and existing capabilities.
Below are some key considerations to ensuring successful organizational change:
- Executive sponsorship: As with all programs, visible, active sponsorship is the top factor for success. Without active executive sponsorship, digital programs may not receive the prioritization and collaboration required to implement them effectively.
- Measurement: A primary advantage of digital channel engagement is that it provides the opportunity to collect data, analyze usage, and quickly adjust. Alignment of measurement with business objectives is key. Too often, just digital activity is measured, instead of engagement effectiveness.
- Data management: Digital engagement is built on great customer data. McKinsey & Company research indicates that companies leveraging customer behavioral insights outperform their peers in sales by 85 percent, and by more than 25 percent in gross margin.
- Customer journey: Companies that excel at customer engagement have an established digital and personal tailored plan for each customer that is balanced across deep insights, individual needs and preferences and company objectives and considers ease of access, the specific service required, type of content, and expected speed of response.
- Content: After examining the customer journey, it is important to create relevant content that maps to each segment along the way. This demands an efficient, agile and fast content process.
- Training: Digital programs will require training not just on how to use new technology applications to interact with HCPs, but also on instruction for corporate usage guidelines, appropriate content usage, compliance considerations, and the best methods for personalizing interaction.
Enterprise technologies and industry best practices have matured to the extent that all life sciences companies can now engage HCPs through cost-effective and compliant digital methods in a way that provides significant mutual value. But these channels continue to develop rapidly, offering an advantage to those companies that continuously evolve their approach.
About the author
Jan van den Burg is responsible for strategy of Veeva’s Commercial Suite of Applications, focusing on the European market. He has over 20 years’ experience in the software and services industry, mostly dedicated to Pharmaceuticals.
Most recently, Jan was leading the Life Sciences Sales & Marketing group in IBM Global Business Services, engaging at strategic level with top 20 Pharmaceutical companies on Customer Relationship Management, Closed Loop Marketing, Multi-Channel and Digital Marketing as well as Digital Asset Management. Prior to IBM, Jan set up and ran the European business for Proscape Technologies, the then leader in Closed Loop Marketing, successfully developing the market from inception, establishing the concept and leading the early implementations.