Delivering Personalized Experiences at Scale: A Fresh Look at Customer Centricity

David Laros
Partner
Beghou Consulting

Customer centricity. An overused buzzword in the life sciences industry. Yet an important goal. In an era of eroding rep access, fragmented channels and growing complexity in treatment decisions, building a customer-centric commercial operation is more difficult than ever. In our recent survey of life sciences senior executives in commercial operations, analytics, technology, and marketing, a majority identified “patient identification and journey mapping” (56%) and “HCP engagement” (53%) as critical areas where they need to improve. These findings shine a light on the pressing need for companies to take a fresh look at customer centricity.

Customer centricity hinges on personalization. Personalization requires “n-of-1” capabilities in a company’s data analysis and commercial execution efforts. Companies can work to blend robust data and analytics with local knowledge to generate actionable insights. These insights should drive improved intelligence, decision-making, and personalized communications and promotion. AI and machine learning can then help a company scale its personalization efforts. Armed with rich and contextual AI-generated insights, reps can better prioritize and plan outreach efforts.

Nicole Ventrone
Partner
Beghou Consulting

To enable a holistic and coordinated customer-centric sales and marketing operation that drives engagement with HCPs and supports patients, life sciences companies can focus on people, processes, and technology.

People: Aligning the organization with the customer

Silos are the enemy of customer centricity. Yet, in too many organizations, silos exist across commercial operations. As a result, teams spanning sales, marketing, omnichannel, analytics, IT and more are not aligned around the customer.

Leading life sciences companies can gain a competitive edge by building a more cohesive and coordinated commercial organization with customer centricity as the unifying goal across teams. Teams will still control their functional areas (e.g., marketing can set strategy, sales can manage details and rep-triggered communications). And in a customer-centric organization, these formerly siloed activities will expand and connect. For example, the sales team’s responsibilities should include servicing HCPs across channels. Sales reps should aim to become trusted advisers to HCPs by providing valuable and relevant information (e.g., training, deep knowledge), tailored to each HCP’s unique preferences. These expanded sales activities naturally influence marketing activities. Therefore, marketing should work closely with sales and provide the strategy, tools, messages, and collateral to enable commercial success.

While data, analytics and technology play a crucial role in enabling commercial action and cross-functional collaboration, there’s a human element that can’t be ignored. Companies can consider putting in place a “coordinator” to drive customer centricity across the organization. In our work with life sciences companies, we have seen coordinators play key roles in successfully orchestrating complex customer-engagement initiatives. The coordinator needs to understand the commercial ecosystem, including personal and digital promotion, sales operations, and analytics. Armed with this expertise, the coordinator can spur the organization along on its journey toward customer centricity. For example, the coordinator can:

• Ensure sales rep requests and local knowledge is included in analytics and operational outputs.
• Educate reps on the strengths, limitations, and nuances of data and analytics outputs.
• Organize and disseminate digestible insights into HCPs, HCOs and HCCs across the commercial organization.
• Help reps decide what promotional tools to leverage in their territories.
• Resolve conflicts and competing priorities so sales, marketing, analytics, and operations teams work together effectively.

Processes: Unify information and insights

With teams and people organized to work collaboratively in service of the customer, companies need to embed processes that prevent the reemergence of silos. These processes should account for and bring together:

• Company goals.
• Customer-level insights.
• Execution across unbranded communications and branded promotion.
• Ongoing alignment and coordination.

These processes must also account for the interplay between various stakeholders in the health care ecosystem. HCPs, HCOs and HCCs influence each other. They make treatment decisions collectively (and with heavy and growing influence from payers and patients). Therefore, a life sciences company should work to reach these players in a coordinated manner, accounting for their levels of awareness and education, as well as the various stages of patient treatment journeys.

There are two key components of customer-centric processes:

• Reporting infrastructure: Make available consistent and aligned reporting that provides a holistic understanding of customers. Reports should feature a comprehensive set of data and information, including:
  1. Profile details (e.g., specialty, KOL status, affiliations, affinities, etc.).
  2. Treatment behaviors (e.g., point and longitudinal insights into Dx, Rx, share, adoption behaviors, etc.).
  3. Promotional engagement (ideal, planned and actual) by channel, individual customer and groups of customers.
  4. HCP professional engagement participation.
• Feedback mechanism: Make it seamless to capture local knowledge from the field and incorporate it into the analytics engine that recommends actions for downstream customer outreach. Collecting feedback is a process issue, but also a technology issue.

Technology: Adopt a predictive posture

Technology should accelerate customer centricity by helping companies be more predictive in their customer-engagement efforts. But it can be a barrier if siloed solutions keep teams from working together. Additionally, technology can be an expensive paperweight if users don’t understand or recognize the value of the technology and how to incorporate it efficiently. When it comes to enabling customer-centric commercial operations, life sciences companies’ technology should help them:

• Improve understanding.
• Provide consumable and actionable insights.
• Enhance customer engagement.
• Support improved patient outcomes.

This last point is often overlooked when companies build technology in silos. Technology is the thread that should connect teams. It should reinforce the company’s customer-centric processes, and it should prompt the actions that ultimately drive customer engagement.

To successfully implement robust commercial technology that supports customer engagement efforts, companies should strive to involve reps and other field-facing personnel early in the design process. They should solicit their input before launch and then embed feedback loops so these users can provide input into future iterations. This collaboration will increase buy-in and usage.

When it comes to activating technology to improve customer engagement, companies should incorporate AI and machine learning capabilities to improve the quality of insights and help teams better prioritize, plan, and deliver customer outreach. Companies can use AI to move away from static call plans to dynamic targeting that incorporates complete data pulled from all touchpoints with customers. Additionally, companies can leverage AI tools to gain a granular understanding of customers’ channel and message preferences. Companies can then equip reps with AI-generated insights (packaged with context around the insights) to guide action. Consider these examples that we have seen work:

• Rep alerts regarding an HCP target: Please deliver a detail or a rep-triggered email to Dr. Smith as claims-based algorithms suggest that she has a patient needing ‘relevant therapy’ and she has recently engaged in related digital content and has not been detailed in three months.
• Rep alerts regarding a specific patient: Please deliver a detail or a rep-triggered email as specific unidentified patient claims data and analysis suggests that Dr. Jones has a rare disease patient who may be soon moving from first to second line therapy.
• Rep alerts regarding an HCO: Based on a longitudinal analysis of the IDN, patients have consistent treatment regimens but low adherence, regardless of the treating physician. Please provide material XYZ that addresses this concern.

Amid mounting complexity, meet the needs of customers

As our report showed, life sciences leaders know there’s more work to be done to improve customer centricity in today’s complex health care environment. A focus on people, processes and technology can help companies break down silos, optimize integration of commercial teams, implement new processes that facilitate holistic planning and execution, and deploy AI-enabled technologies that support dynamic engagement.

Importantly, by focusing on people, processes and technology, companies will enable their reps to be trusted advisers to customers. They will have more immediate knowledge of recent promotional and treatment activities, improved knowledge of the patients HCPs are treating, and an understanding of the opportunities and barriers HCPs face with their affiliated HCOs. The rep will have immediate access to the information they need, want and request. The rep will be able to deliver information in a timely and tailored manner, in line with the HCP’s preferences.

The organizations that optimize people, processes and technology will be able to truly deliver personalized experiences at scale and meet the evolving needs of health care providers, organizations, and patients.

About the authors

Nicole Ventrone and David Laros are partners at Beghou Consulting.