Pharma USA 2023

Mar 28, 2023 - Mar 29, 2023,

Pioneer unparalleled stakeholder engagement at North America’s leading commercial event

Becoming agile in experience measurement 

The customer experience is pharma’s new competitive battleground – trust is its key metric, and the prizes will go to the nimble



The past few years revealed to pharma how vital it is to invest in systems that enable the business to get closer to its customers through digitization and virtual engagement.

As these approaches become a normal part of the engagement mix, they offer powerful new ways to explore, measure, and improve on the customer experience (CX). By extension, they offer new ways to cultivate trust, develop more meaningful relationships over time, and ultimately drive sales. 

Experience Management (XM) is now a key competitive differentiator, says Heidi Celeghin, Head of Global Strategic Sales at Qualtrics. “We found that when HCPs have a great experience with a pharmaceutical company, they're two times more likely to actually want to continue to engage further.”

However, improving XM can only happen with the right tools and approaches in place, says DP Brightful, President of Worldwide Field Operations at Qualtrics. “The only way that you can get to that level is if you deeply understand the customer and the experience that they have had or will have. Investing in a platform that can personalize that experience at scale can be a game-changer.”

One of the reasons XM is so powerful for building long-lasting relationships is the speed at which data is gathered as well as the insights provided on how to move the dial. Adopting a human-centered view and focusing on the moments that matter most can mean the difference between keeping a valued employee or customer or losing them. 

“A good place to start is by building the right capabilities within digital teams, where customers are often already authenticated,” says Celeghin. “They are able to respond in a highly agile manner, which is satisfying for them as employees and results in deeper, more authentic relationships with customers.” 

Personalization and the patient
Enhancing customer interactions via XM is not just of value in improving HCP relationships, however. The advent of direct digital engagement between pharma and patients also creates a wealth of opportunities, says Celeghin. 

“As we move toward more personalized medicine, it becomes possible to contact patients directly and better understand their habits and preferences,” she says.

Brightful adds: “There is much to learn from both patients and providers, and XM is at the heart of it all. What makes a patient stay on medication? What influences their decision to not take medication? How did the providers factor into those decisions? What other factors might be in play to impact their health decisions?”  

Experience Management can enable you to answer these questions. 

Developing an XM discipline
Introducing rigor to experience management is key to unlocking its full potential. There are a few steps to ensuring this happens:  

1.    Collect in-the-moment feedback from HCPs in a non-disruptive manner and through their preferred channels: Mobile web, email, chat, SMS, etc. The ability to unify experience data, access a full view of the omnichannel HCP journey, and identify areas for improvement is critical as it will allow you to determine what drives HCP experience and reallocate investments towards initiatives or activities that yield stronger outcomes.

2.    Assess your customers’ levels of trust to establish baselines from which to measure improvements. It is possible to measure levels of customer trust on your brand directly if you do so tactfully, says Brightful. “We have an arm of Qualtrics that works with organizations to establish this as a discipline. They help design ways of going in and asking in a tasteful manner the questions that will produce the answers you need to be successful.”

3.    Go where the customers are by collecting, listening to, and acting on feedback in multiple channels. Most feedback that customers give today – around 85% – is unstructured, and this is where most of the valuable insight can be found, says Brightful. “You want to look towards solutions that have ways of ingesting and capturing unstructured data,” he says. “People put a lot of feedback in chat. Some very interesting, spirited feedback happens in chat that will let you know how they feel.” And “don’t neglect your own websites”, Brightful adds. More than half (52%) of patients have used pharma websites to research treatment. This is the moment to gather feedback and truly understand what patients are looking for and need to feel confident with your brand.

4.    Analyze the data in the right way by using a range of tools to automate the process and uncover buried insights. “When people call into a contact center, the recordings are rich sources of information," says Brightful. "There are platforms out there that will take that transcribe it into text and then allow you to go in and analyze and apply AI and machine learning over that. There are even systems that are out there that will do things like look at web replays.”

5.    Take the right action to develop highly engaging and trusted experiences for customers. “This is the chance to create competitive advantage,” Brightful says.“Do you have the right systems of action in place? Can you go in and actually take action on what your customer said?”

The Power of XM
In good economic times as well as times of uncertainty, organizations can increase focus on speed to market by reducing friction and better understanding how to serve both customers and employees. The tools now exist that enable organizations to proactively engage and discover all the other things that customers and employees are saying in the contact center, on social media, on review sites, and in dozens of other places, Brightful says.

“Using all listening channels – and taking the right action on those analytics – is crucial for both employees and customers,” he explains. “Your employees will give you critical feedback that will help you improve, while also improving their job satisfaction. When you have happier and more engaged employees, they will provide better care and provide better experiences for your customers.”

Learn more here.



Pharma USA 2023

Mar 28, 2023 - Mar 29, 2023,

Pioneer unparalleled stakeholder engagement at North America’s leading commercial event