Omnichannel Execution: The New Performance Frontier

The rules of customer engagement in biopharma are changing. Are your customer-facing teams ready to compete and win in an AI-powered omnichannel world?

A lot has changed in the last 18 months:

• Fewer in-person meetings
• More digital channels
• More digital content
• New AI tools
• More complex dashboards
• More stakeholders to influence

It can feel overwhelming.

The question is:?

How do we empower our customer-facing teams to leverage all the new digital tools, content, and channels to drive growth and create a better treatment experience than the competition?

Learning and development have a key role to play by providing customer-facing teams with the skills to effectively engage at a higher level and provide managers with the skills to coach and pull it through.?

New Mindsets, Behaviors, & Workflows for an Omnichannel World.

“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” ~ Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of OZ

The pandemic gave us a taste of what the new omnichannel reality might look like, Zoom calls have surpassed in-person engagement. Rep-triggered emails and text messages have replaced physician handouts and reprint carriers.?

Bringing Value in the Age of Digital Overwhelm.

HCPs are flooded with more digital content across more channels than ever before, but behavior change is slower than ever.?

Digital transformation is inevitable, but we need to be more strategic about delivering the right content, through the right channels, at the right time, because if it doesn’t change behavior, it doesn’t matter.

Each piece of digital content has to find a home in the mind of our customers. If we want to stay relevant, we have to be much more intentional about teamwork, collaboration, and omnichannel engagement.

Better Insights Deliver Better Outcomes.

How do we train our customer-facing teams to leverage the latest tools and insights to create sustainable impact?

It doesn’t happen automatically. If you were to follow reps around their home office, scheduling appointments, doing VEEVA Engage calls, riding in the car, face-to-face with customers, back in the car, calling and texting HCPs, and then back home responding to emails, planning the next day, you’ll find a big gap between top and middle performers.?

It used to be: How big is your footprint in the practice?

Now it’s: How big is your footprint across all the channels that impact HCP mindset, behavior, and experience?

We need to reimagine targeting, reach, and frequency through the lens of consistently delivering high-impact content across every stakeholder through their preferred channels in an AI-informed, predictive analytics context.

That’s a mouthful, but it boils down to five things: Strategy, Teamwork, Activation, Resolving Barriers, and Securing Commitment.

Focusing Omnichannel Engagement on Supporting Behavior Change.

Ironically, all the new AI tools, dashboards, digital content, and channels are overwhelming instead of empowering our customer-facing teams. The solution is to give them a more impactful set of workflows to do five important things:

1. Strategy for Change. Identify what needs to change and how you’ll change it. Whether it’s a physician, a mid-level, a nurse practitioner, or a reimbursement specialist, start by defining the specific changes in mindset and behavior that will drive demand and elevate the total treatment experience.
2. Foster an entirely new level of teamwork and collaboration between all members of your customer-facing teams to deliver a seamless customer experience for the physician, the patient, and the practice as a system of care.
3. Activate change. For HCPs to change behavior we need to give them compelling reasons in a format that resonates and is actionable. It needs to be clear, credible, and compelling. And it needs to be seamless and consistent across their preferred channel of engagement.
4. Resolve barriers to change. Even if you want to change – barriers, friction, and complexity can conspire to shudder the change process. We used to believe that strong motivation would overcome any barrier, but it’s just not true anymore. Amazon has trained the world to expect everything to be simple, seamless, and delivered the next day. That’s become the new standard every service provider is expected to deliver whether we like it or not.
5. Secure commitment to change. Information and education are not enough to drive change. You have to ask for a meaningful commitment that moves the needle. And once achieved, we have to take action to make sure it doesn’t drift back to the status quo. Sustainability should never be an afterthought. It should be baked into step one: Strategy.

Strategy and Leveraging the Best Available Insights.

How do we achieve that? Here is a bit more detail on how to simplify change through better teamwork, collaboration, and omnichannel customer engagement

Strategy.?

At the end of the day, only two questions matter:

• Did it change HCP behavior?
• Did it create a better end-to-end experience than the competition?

Strategy is about using our dashboards, good probing strategies, AI predictive analytics, and sharing key insights across the customer engagement team to articulate what needs to change and how you’ll change it to achieve those twin goals.?

Strategy is about leveraging the best available insights to:

1. Articulate what needs to change at the individual, account, and even ecosystem level to move the needle for our brand and create better end-to-end treatment experiences than the competition.
2. Define how you’re going to change it at every level: The individual healthcare provider level, the account as a system of care level, treatment protocols, simplifying reimbursement, and key stakeholders in the larger ecosystem.
3. Deciding what high-impact content to share across which HCP-preferred channels in what sequence for how long. Because treatment choice and treatment experience happen across many stakeholders who touch the patient, we need to work together like never before to create a more integrated and seamless customer experience than the competition. And that requires a higher level of teamwork and collaboration than we’ve previously achieved.

Teamwork and Omnichannel Activation.

Teamwork.

Transformational change is definitely a team sport.?

It’s one thing to get an individual HCP to change. It’s quite another to get an account as a system of care to change. As the saying goes, “You need teamwork to make the dream work.”

FRMs, reps, DMs, and even MSLs have a role to play in the larger change strategy. And even though most people get the need to work together as a team to affect change, hardly anyone does it well. It’s an opportunity to beat the competition for those who make deep collaboration, seamless integration, and teamwork a priority.

Activation.

Delivering the right content in the right way to the right people at the right time is the heartbeat that drives transformational change.?

Cadence is key. Repetition is essential.?Like AI, we are training the healthcare providers neural network to think and act in a new way:?

If this … in this context … prescribe that … because ... clinical evidence, patient impact.

It’s a kind of machine learning in the human brain. And for those of you who are freaking out right now, this is nothing new. AI works because it models the human neural net, not the other way around.

Resolving Barriers and Securing Commitment to Change.

Resolving barriers to change.

Activating the need to change with clear, credible, and compelling content is the starting point for change, but we need to do more. We need to keep our eyes open to barriers to change of any kind. Mental barriers, protocol barriers, friction, and complexity.

Anything and everything that gets in the way of change must be handled or behavior change comes to a screeching halt. We used to call this objection handling, but we now know that objections are only one kind of barrier to change.

Some of this can be done preemptively through omnichannel education, but a lot of it boils down to reading the HCP’s reaction, asking the right questions, and not making assumptions.

Ultimately, the goal is to create a simple and seamless total treatment experience for every stakeholder along the continuum of care for your brand.?A simple and seamless patient journey wins the day.

Securing commitment to change.

It’s one thing to get an HCP nodding in agreement. It’s another thing to get them to actually commit to change. It’s kind of like the difference between “What do you think about marriage?” and “Will you marry me?” Those two questions create very different outcomes.

Asking for an incremental commitment is a simple but powerful strategy for creating forward momentum without overwhelming the customer. It’s a lot easier to say yes to: “Would you like to grab a cup of coffee?” than “What are you doing for the rest of your life?”

Having achieved an incremental commitment, like: “Will you read this new clinical study?” is definitely a good thing, but you have to follow up and make sure they actually read it. Why? Because life gets in the way.

Building in pull-through and sustainability from the beginning is essential for securing commitment to change. It should be baked into our strategy for change from the start.

Ready to Take Omnichannel Customer Engagement to the Next Level? Think Quantum.

The rules of customer engagement are changing.?

We’ve definitely crossed a digital tipping point. Omnichannel customer engagement is the new normal but, as we’ve seen, we need to move from delivering digital content to creating digital impact. Because if it doesn’t change behavior and create a better treatment experience than the competition, it truly doesn’t matter.

Omnichannel customer engagement is a powerful strategy to effect behavior change and move the needle for your brands. It’s a brave new world that requires better workflows to deliver better outcomes and create a seamless experience for all the stakeholders who touch the patient for our brands.

If you found this article valuable, please:?

1. Like, share, and comment with your thoughts, questions, and experiences.?
2. Press subscribe to receive articles just like this for research-based insights proven to move the needle.