How RPA and Intelligent Automation & Augmentation change the game for Marketing, Sales and Customer Service in Life Science companies
This article explains how a full range of available, advanced technologies empowers the Marketing, Sales and Customer Service functions to better carry out their traditional responsibilities and expand their roles & positive impact on the customer. The article offers many practical use cases that the author has implemented with his teams. It also explains the importance of customer centricity and outcome focused & evidence based work, which becomes the foundation for not only marketing, sales and customer service, but also all other business functions.
"Customer centricity" becomes a common objective and "virtual business function"
Everything has become about customer centricity across most industries. It also and especially applies to Life Science and Health care! Every department, business function and role must support it. "Customer centricity" may be understood not only an objective & mission statement, but also as a virtual business function where people from across the entire organization and much of the external ecosystem collaborate as needed to achieve related objectives.
"Customer" has moved to the center: Many different types of "customers. Companies need to define and understand persona, multiple personality types with a target persona and support them along their respective customer journeys. For example, a person with a chronic disease may go through several phases including pre-diagnosis (recognition of issues/ research/ contact physician), diagnosis (doctor visits, specialist examination, treatment plans) and active disease management (follow drug prescriptions, monitoring of vitals, physical exercise, nutrition adaptation, active life style improvements).
A detailed customer journey for a home medical equipment may look as follow:
Few organizations will be able to cover/ support the entire customer journey. A company should therefore focus on where it can add value and collaborate with numerous suitable players across the ecosystem. A company may support a better customer experience, another increase the speed/ efficiency/ costs of overall solution delivery, a third company to add special analytical insights, a forth to supply necessary data, etc.
Read this article on what truly impacts the health. Click here...
Another way to look at it is to place the customer in the center. The customer engages and receives support from both Consumer Health Tech and Enterprise Health Care organizations: Consumer Health Tech includes Health monitors, mobile & wellness, pharmacy, advocacy, social media. Numerous applications (Personal/ mobile EMR, remote monitoring, health apps, wearables). Enterprise Health Care includes health care providers, medtech, payers, government and other stakeholders. Numerous applications (Research collaboration, IoT implants, patient adherence, care delivery).
Outcome focused Value and Evidence based product & services supported by data
Biopharma and medical device companies need to overhaul their business models. The lucrative mass-market selling of drugs needs to give way to new approach to selling.
(Read this article on details. Click below…)
Payers, customers, providers, governments put much pressure on companies to prove the value and outcome of their products and services with hard-facts. Institutions increasingly around the world demand hard-facts. Companies have to collect evidence throughout the process of developing, manufacturing, marketing, delivering and monitoring their drugs and products. The "evidence life cycle" goes through Discovering, Generating and Optimizing value states. It starts with the research and goes through development and commercialization stages. It includes efforts as follow: Biomarker Hypothesis Generation/ Validation and covers Clinical Trial Design & Optimization, Population Segmentation, Safety/ Pharmacovigilance, Comparative Effectiveness Research, Therapeutic Area Assessment, Pricing/ Contracting Market Access Strategies, Therapeutic Value Optimization, In-line marketing and Omni-Channel Customer Engagement.
Companies need to collect, aggregate, document and analyze data from numerous sources. The process is not linear, but rather circular. During the commercialization and use phase of the products/ drugs, the companies need to collect Real World Evidence, which then feeds back into the R&D and Trial functions. RWE data notably exceed the Random Clinical Trials (RCT) data and is still underutilized. RWE applies across the Value chain: Global safety, Pharmacovigilance, HEOR, Commercial Analytics.
Technology becomes a game changer and enabler for business functions
Data and technologies allow to automate many tasks and parts of the process, help people to focus their time on more value adding tasks and extend human abilities capabilities to achieve unprecedented customization and medical breakthroughs.
Read about intelligent automation. Click below...
Marketing
Marketing will maintain its traditional functions such Strategic and Product marketing, Campaign Management, Research & analysis. At the same time, marketing should evolve with the mandates and opportunities of our times. It includes understanding the customer intrinsically better and coaching other colleagues across the organization to better align to related efforts.
Numerous use cases for RPA, Data & Analytics, AI, ML, BI & Visualization are as follow:
Global & Local forecasting: Key factor analysis. Benchmarking & Competitive Intelligence. Collaboration & partnering across the ecosystem.
Segment customers & patients: Different personality types, ways/ reluctance to engage with digital technologies, Engagement types. Health Status, Chronic diseases, Rare diseases. Proactive/ passive/ negligent life style toward health, financial spending/ wallet share. Insurance type, employee program, co-pay. Health conditions, Hereditary/ ethnic conditions/ epidemiology, gene read. Receptiveness to drugs/ treatments.
Registration of Dossiers per region: Reduce high time and resource burden to produce dossiers. Leverage latest cognitive technology to self-write.
Marketing mix optimization. Tactics that grow prescription base (NRx) versus driving patient refills (TRx).
Customized target group and individualized actions: Omni-channel marketing & communication. Promotions & Campaigns.
Assisted/ automated event organization. Digital events and tracking.
Web & Ecommerce sites. Community. Social Media.
Read more on customer engagement. Click here..
Sales
The mandate for value based care and evidence/ outcome driven pricing also impacts Sales. Now leading Biopharma companies upgrade the quality of their sales teams to provide value/ insights to customers. Sales tactics take a secondary position. Data & advanced technologies can provide sales people with game changing enablement: Specific insights into individual doctors and decision makers. Customized materials and information. Fact, convenient, safe access to support systems. Assisted/ automated reporting. Customized training courses and learning. Build up digital dexterity.
Customer Service
Leading companies are turning their customer service centers into strategic important functions that can increase quality of customer engagement knowledge base, next best answer/ decision/ action, help expand/ differentiate the brand(s), generate revenues (up/ cross sell), delight customers, increase wallet share. Full range of outsourcing, shared service center solutions, platforms, systems and technologies are available. Intelligent tools increase ability to "mass customize".
Contact me to hear about full end-to-end solutions: From Web portal with personalized page/ content display, smart FAQs, AI driven messenger, smart routing to virtual agent, warm-handover to human agents empowered by full data/ analytics/ AI support, with integration to backend functions, supply chain and end-to-end delivery/ service.
Read on how to manage customer data across the organization. Click here...
How we engage with and can help Chief Marketing, Director of Sales and Customer Services…
... understand the complexities of the market, competitors, possible collaborators/ allies, and overall ecosystem
... shape market access & entry strategies. Guide on and enable value based pricing.
... gain deeper insights into customers, patients, hospitals, doctors, Key Opinion leaders (KOLs), and other stakeholders
... define personas, map their journeys, identify/ support each touchpoint.
... provide/ leverage full spectrum of data & Analytics, Business Intelligence & Visualization, Artificial Intelligence.
... build customer experience platforms to support the above
Conclusion
RPA and Intelligent Automation are empowering Marketing, Sales and Customer Services. The same applies to other key business functions. Feel free to read related articles by the same author.
About the author: Alex Steinberg comes out of a family of doctors, scientists and other health care professionals who have sacrificed their lives to improve the health & well-being of people. Alex works drives digital transformation, innovation and intelligent automation efforts for the largest companies his China.
You may also reach out to me personally. You can communicate with me through email at [email protected] or WeChat (ID: alexwsteinberg2 ).
Legal disclaimer:
This article represents my personal opinion and does not reflect that of my current/ previous employer(s) or clients. The article intends to increase awareness, understanding and dialog about Health Care and Life Science issues. It does not present any offer or advice in a legal sense. Markets and technology change quickly and information gets out-of-date. The reader is advised to get individual analysis & consultation.