Creating customer experiences

A lot is written about how important customer experience is in pharma – three of the first 10 posts in my LinkedIn feed this week feature some aspect of it. However, as the titles of the articles listed below suggest it’s almost always presented as a technology challenge:

• Post 1: AI and optimising the customer experience
• Post 2: The changing role of AI in CX
• Post 3: Improve your brand’s omnichannel leadership and customer experience.

What they all have in common, beyond a lot of tech buzzwords, is that none get into what customer experience really is, or what it’s made up of, or what matters most in improving it. You sort of get left with the impression that data and technology are critical. This ‘impression’ just doesn’t feel right to me – they have a role, but we shouldn’t overplay it.

I appreciate customer experience is an intuitive concept to a point, but, given AI was in two titles I asked Bard (Google’s Chat GPT alternative) to explain customer experience. It reported back that the key components of customer experience are:

• Product or service experience: The customer's interaction with the actual product or service, including its quality, functionality, and ease of use.
• Customer service: The interactions a customer has with a company's support team, such as resolving issues, assisting, and handling complaints.
• Brand personality: The initial impression a customer forms of a brand based on its messaging and visuals.
• Channel experience: The customer's experience across various channels, such as websites, mobile app, physical stores, and social media.
• Personalization: The ability to tailor the customer experience to individual preferences and needs.

What I like about this list is the order of it. I think it’s nicely prioritised in terms of how pharmaceutical companies should look at the overall customer experience they provide. And, how much time and money they should invest in which elements of it.

It was also a slight surprise how low profile the more data and tech-led aspects of customer experience are in the list. So having ticked the AI box for this post I’ll write a few of my thoughts on each of these components.

Product experience

The least surprising fact ever is that the experience healthcare professionals have with your medicines is critical to their ongoing use. If the patient does well, they will try it in more patients, if not, then they will soon stop trying it. But can pharma people in brand, medical, and omnichannel teams change the product experience?

I was originally going to write about the MoSCoW, RICE, and Kano methods for prioritising product feature development but that’s a bit on the niche side so I changed tack – instead I’m going to cover one in a very cut down way. However, do look them up.

The Kano Method, as one example, provides a really helpful structure for categorising ‘basic’, ‘performance’, and ‘delighter’ product features.

Basic: In pharma, the basic features might be that the medicine has a licence and is reimbursed. These are the entry-level requirements that a product must have to be considered.

Performance: The performance features might be that its efficacy and safety are at least equivalent to the competition. These are the features people expect the brand to have and that they will consider when selecting a product.

Delighters: The delighters are the unexpected positives. It could be that you are the first oral or have a much faster onset of action.

However, it’s now more common than ever that new medicines don’t have an intrinsic stand-out delighter feature. And this is where the opportunities are for cross-functional pharma teams. How about creating a shared risk approach where the medicine is free for the first three months? Or offering a free biomarker testing service? Or create a way to remotely monitor patient experience for the first 12 weeks to aid that all-important 3-month follow-up.

These might all create a delightful point of difference that adds significantly to the healthcare professional experience. The Kano (MoSCoW or RICE) models are great tools for finding and assessing this type of product innovation based on customer insights and needs. It’s an assessment all cross-functional teams should do in pre-launch. If you want to nerd out on any of these models let me know – it will be a fun discussion for at least one of us!

Customer service

In some ways, I think this is what a lot of us think about when we think about customer experience. In pharma, quite a lot of people and teams fall under this umbrella including medical, field and commercial teams. Stating the blindingly obvious the more informed, understanding, empathetic and value-adding every interaction between a healthcare professional and anyone from the company is the better.

Pharma has always been good at this bit and so I’m not going to write much about it. However, I do want to point out that customer service can be made special by tiny details. For example, when:

• medical teams mention the latest paper the HCP wrote in their interactions
• a country GM comes to an event and shows real interest in the HCPs there
• you take real care with venues and menus and the way you ‘show up’
• you are early and organised and consistent with invitations, agendas, pre-reads and communications about activities
• one person from the company is the go-to for anything.

Brand personality

In some ways, the creative process is about creating filters for people to view the product through. The colours, images, and design can play a part in influencing who we see as the right people to use medicines in. They can create associations, emphasise certain features, and trigger emotions.

Combined in the right way, well-articulated messages highlighting key aspects of the product experience, with inspiring visuals and design, can help you:

• Get noticed
• Define the settings where you should be considered
• Frame a clear call to action that supports appropriate use in the people likely to benefit most.

Channel experience

Most of the interactions healthcare professionals have with pharma are covered above – and the majority are still in person. However, there is also email, webinars, websites, and video calls (AKA ‘omnichannel’) to consider. Given how ubiquitous these technologies are in everyday life I think we are overly focussed on the idea that omnichannel is the answer to every CX question. However, it does matter and improving the fundamentals of omnichannel is important.

For me, the start point is aligning the tech stack across the company so that there is one HQ email system, one webinar plug-in, one registration plug-in, one website backend, and one data lake fed by all these systems across all brands. Once that platform is in place then we can get to the good stuff – some of it covered in other issues of this newsletter.

Personalisation

We’re fortunate in pharma to still have field teams as nothing feels more personal than when people actually know you. As we strive for automation in this space, we shouldn’t forget that as humans we pick up a tonne of ‘data’ about the other person just from saying hello in a corridor that is very hard to do digitally.

Where interactions aren’t or can’t be human-led, simple touches can make a huge difference. For example, almost all healthcare professional websites open with the same question ‘Are you an HCP? Why not ask if they are an HCP interested in dermatology, oncology or neurology (if they are your company's therapeutic areas)? Doing that takes the same time to answer but means you can instantly show them content specific to their interests.

In conclusion

Everyday life experience tells us that typically the brands providing the best overall customer experiences tend to trend to the top. However, I think we’re guilty of neither seeing it holistically enough nor focussing on the details enough. Instead, we generalise about how tech can help us with personalisation, or about why we need to know customers' channel preferences.

If pharma’s cross-functional teams come together regularly to review the main pillars of customer experience outlined above, perhaps using models such as Kano, MoSCoW or RICE, I think they could prioritise and deliver more of what matters most to their healthcare professional customers.

After all, in some therapeutic settings, the prescribing customers at a country level are fewer than 500 people. In that context understanding the actual experiences of each individual can be transformative. Cross-functional teams can know who they met, what they attended, what the emails they opened looked like, how much they liked using the website, who talked to them and how they really feel about the company, its people and its medicines. Those are the sorts of insights that can drive brilliant experiences.

It's when we get back to thinking deeply about real people and how each interaction adds up to change how they feel that we make real progress on improving customer experiences. So let’s talk a little less about the tech and a little more about how we can create more moments of joy for customers.