It’s interesting how, in Pharma businesses, customer experience should take priority over profit. But that’s only sometimes the case. Many pharma companies today are ranked as having the least customer-friendly experience. Finding how to maintain profitable revenue growth without compromising the quality of your customer experience makes you stand out from the crowd of Pharma companies.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the best strategies for enhancing customer experiences. For you, this could mean driving high customer engagement and developing a feedback loop that helps you understand where you need improvements in various touchpoints of your customer journey and experience.
Providing top-notch customer experience gives a competitive advantage that guarantees positive business results and helps upsell the lifetime value chain of your customers.
Table of Contents
- How important is patient-centric pharma marketing?
- Touchpoints in a patient’s journey where pharma companies can improve customer experience
- How can pharma companies measure customer experience?
- Do patient-support programs enhance customer experience?
- How Platforce can help improve customer experience
- Why pharma industries need a digital solution for better customer experience
- How pharma companies can partner with patients for better customer experience
- Key takeaways
How Important is Patient-Centric Pharma Marketing?
Any reliable patient-centric approach employs techniques that prioritize patient support services and customer satisfaction over everything else. In return, it guarantees profits, brand loyalty, and customer lifetime value to your brand.
In today’s marketing world, a customer-centric approach is a strategy that guarantees results in the Pharma industry because it gives a sense of importance. In most cases, it builds the idea that your business only exists for their needs. What could be more assuring? Other advantages being customer-centered gives you over other healthcare providers include:
- Empowering patients and enhancing patients’ experience
- Improving patient outcomes
- Tailoring treatment plans for individual patient requirements.
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Promotes compliance with regulatory standards
- Guarantees customer longevity and lifetime value to your Pharma business.
Touch Points in a Patient’s Journey Where Pharma Companies Can Improve Customer Experience
For pharmaceutical companies, it takes more work to guarantee customer centricity or understand customer needs. Especially since there are almost always intermediaries like prescribing physicians, regulators, and payers, these intermediaries often significantly contribute to the overall Pharma customer experience (CX).
Since you cannot eradicate intermediaries or even meet customers, having a workaround would suffice. But, it starts with understanding major touch points where you can provide positive customer engagement for improved customer experience.
Awareness and Education
Many healthcare journeys start with the patient’s awareness of their condition, potential treatments, and clinical trials. Here, pharmaceutical companies can contribute by providing accurate, precise, and patient-friendly educational materials through accessible digital channels. These materials help patients understand their condition and make informed decisions about their health.
It also allows the Pharma industry to facilitate data-driven customer engagement. The interaction between a patient and their healthcare provider is crucial as it contributes to how pharma can improve customer experience.
Any reliable Pharma company should support this touchpoint by providing healthcare professionals with comprehensive and up-to-date information on medications and treatment options. In doing so, they facilitate more informed discussions and decisions that boost the Pharma customer engagement strategies.
Access and Affordability
Simplifying the process of obtaining medications and ensuring affordability is a critical touchpoint. By working on transparent pricing, collaborating with insurance providers, and offering assistance programs, pharma companies can reduce the financial burden on patients.
Additionally, actively seeking and incorporating feedback is a hallmark of patient-centric care. By collecting patient insights, pharma companies can continuously improve their services to match customer expectations.
Community and Support Groups
The power of shared experiences in patient communities is immense. Pharmaceutical companies can support or facilitate the creation of patient support groups, fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment among patients.
Key opinion leaders are also a significant contributing community and support group factor. Sometimes, they spearhead actions on these groups and can influence your potential customers. They could also be instrumental in your strategies to guarantee seamless customer experiences.
End of Treatment/Follow-up
As patients transition out of treatment, they may require resources to adapt to life post-treatment or prepare for a new phase. Pharmaceutical companies can offer guidance and support to ease this transition.
Staying connected with patients even after their treatment concludes is a critical touchpoint. Collecting data on their long-term outcomes not only supports patients but contributes to improving future treatments and patient care.
Maintaining stringent quality assurance and regulatory compliance is a non-negotiable aspect of pharmaceutical care. Patients trust that the medications they receive meet the highest standards for safety and efficacy.
How Can Pharma Companies Measure Customer Experience?
Providing a fantastic customer experience can be a stretch for many new pharma businesses, especially since interactions between pharma companies and end-users are minimal. So, it begs the question: how can you improve your customer experience if you cannot measure it?
Workarounds can help pharmaceutical businesses measure how customers perceive their business to show where they need to improve to provide these customers with high-end customer experiences.
To measure customer satisfaction in the pharmaceutical industry, consider using:
- Surveys,
- the Net Promoter Score (NPS),
- complaint tracking,
- focus groups,
- online reviews and social media monitoring,
- key performance indicators (KPIs),
- benchmarking,
- employee feedback,
- longitudinal analysis, and
- data analytics.
These methods will help you gauge customer sentiment, improve services, and maintain trust. However, these measures must be controlled to eliminate some of the controversies like survey bias, NPS limitations, and private concerns that surround each action.
Do Patient-support Programs Enhance Customer Experience?
Patient support programs are a strategic approach for enhancing customer experiences. But, deploying a patient support program is only achievable with real-world data or real-world evidence that aims to help you onboard the right customers.
These programs should utilize personalized engagement strategies and market research that addresses the pain points of your customer journeys. It should also encourage and provide access to valuable information sharing.
How Platforce Can Help Improve Customer Experience
Some other strategies we’d explore use digital transformation to analyze key performance indicators in exceptional customer experiences. These are the kinds of techniques deployed by leading companies to keep their services customer-centric.
Platforce is one of such digital innovations that helps you pique your customer’s minds and develop practical customer-centric strategies using advanced customer data analytics or online footprint.
Some of the most significant digital solutions for improving Pharma customers’ experience that Platforce provides include:
Omnichannel Marketing
Any Pharma business brand that focuses on omnichannel marketing would be able to quickly provide a consistent buying experience across all the channels it operates on. This experience cuts across in-store, socials, internet, and SMS.
Many people today are undeniably mobile. As a business, you must measure up to provide a seamless user interface across all these platforms to help your customers not feel the need to learn new models or new intricacies when they switch to new channels of communication.
Online CRMs
To guarantee customer engagement, pharma companies need to be seamless. With Platforce, you can use online CRMs to collect and analyze patient data. These insights provide a better understanding of patient behaviors, preferences, and needs. This data-driven approach allows for the continuous improvement of patient services.
Also, CRMs make it easier to automate tasks or reminders. This can help in cases of treating patients with Alzheimer’s, where they’d need to be reminded to medicate. Other benefits include:
- Medication adherence tracking
- Feedback collection
- Data security and privacy
- Efficient appointment scheduling.
- Personalized engagements and patient interactions
Offline CLM
Offline Closed-Loop Marketing (CLM) systems in the pharmaceutical industry offer personalized, educational, and interactive interactions with healthcare professionals (HCPs). These systems provide efficient access to information, ensuring consistency in messaging, compliance, and data collection.
They save time and resources and are environmentally responsible, contributing to a more positive customer experience for pharmaceutical representatives and HCPs.
Why Pharma Industries Need a Digital Solution for Better Customer Experience
It’s evident that crafting an exceptional customer experience strategy isn’t just an option; it’s a necessity. The days of focusing solely on traditional channels within the healthcare ecosystem, like doctors, pharmacies, and para-pharmacies, are now behind us. Today, the healthcare emergency, with all its urgency, needs a more comprehensive approach.
The magic word here is “integration.” Everything within the world we see today is now undeniably digital. Other industries that have implemented digital strategies with in-person processes have had breathtaking results in their approach to customer centricity. So, many health systems and Pharma industries must learn to do the same for similar results.
The emerging digital world holds the key to personalization – a concept that helps the healthcare industry put the customer at the center stage. Platforce is one example of a digital solution that allows many pharma companies to make sense of big digital data.
How Pharma Companies Can Partner with Patients for Better Customer Experience
Pharma companies are often working tirelessly to provide premium services to their customers but often need to pay more attention to the role of patients in how they can improve their services.
The truth is that patients remain a crucial player in the Pharma ecosystem and can provide valuable clues on what problems need a solution and what Pharma companies should focus on.
For example, some patients refuse to fill new prescriptions because they are relatively unaffordable, and others will not show up for scheduled appointments because of the availability of transportation or lack of childcare coverage. In some cases, patients stop taking medication because there are no commendable results after prolonged use. These are all cues, but are Pharma businesses paying attention?
Key Takeaways
Arguably, enhancing customer experience is not a walk in the park. But, if done correctly, it guarantees customer satisfaction and provides useful data for personalized and targeted marketing for nurturing the right leads rather than wasting resources on unconvertible leads.
With the increasing number of intermediaries between Pharma companies and end-users, it becomes increasingly difficult to reach a desirable customer experience.
Nonetheless, with the help of highly operational and optimized software solutions, you can remove these barriers. Let’s show you how.