Accelerating to the Future of Customer Engagement

Our Vision
 

The reality of the Life Sciences industry is rapidly evolving, leaving space for new challenges to arise while creating opportunities for companies to drive innovation in multiple areas of their business.

Specifically in the Commercial domain, market trends and business imperatives, such as increasing price pressure, rise of specialized services and others, are reshaping customer engagement strategies and practices, requiring organizations to focus their investments and make deliberate decisions regarding engagement channels. Additionally, with the proliferation of specialized technologies, it becomes crucial to align business and IT to leverage existing platforms more effectively and cultivate new capabilities for more effective interactions with increasingly diverse customer segments. Around 80% of healthcare professionals expressed that, despite numerous investments in omnichannel by Life Sciences companies, communication often reads as one-size-fits-all¹.

These customer needs represent a call to action for Life Sciences companies, who must rethink the way they engage with their customers in strategic terms, ensuring continued success and stronger relationship building in the future.

We believe that there is an array of Customer Engagement Models of the future that can help organizations think through their own unique model for success. These models are the emerging archetypes derived from research and client engagements and can be used to inform the differentiating capabilities organizations need to build as they step into the future of customer engagement.

Most companies will ultimately focus on 1 or 2 models to "get right" depending on the design of their business. While aspects of others may persist in the organization, the prioritized models can help guide investment choices and drive differentiation in the market. This choice should consider specific business aspirations, priority customer segments, and product portfolio.

The customization of the customer engagement models requires a reflection on the capabilities to cultivate to meet customers’ needs, and subsequent investigation of the supporting technology to bring key capabilities to life. The upcoming technological shifts and architectural changes in core platforms like Veeva and Salesforce act as catalyst for change, making today the right moment to push for a business-led initiative to build a future-proof, flexible and effective customer engagement system, with CRM at the heart of successful enablement.

Goals of the Strategic Customer Engagement Investment:
 

• Evolve customer engagement to support the future of your portfolio and the complexity it will bring (e.g., across therapeutic areas, life cycle stages, customer sets).
• Deliver consistent and appropriately personalized experiences across all customer archetypes, including support for new stakeholders.
• Enhance customer engagement and inform future CRM capabilities to provide an integrated, cross-functional engagement model that accommodates customers' changing preferences and a broader range of channels.
• Support further collaboration and transparency within the organization by bringing a broader range of business functions onto common CRM platforms and creating integrated data sets.

Where do you stand in your journey? Get in touch with our industry leaders and commercial experts and join our ad-hoc Future of Customer Engagement (FoCE) Labs to co-design your next steps to success.

¹ EPG Future of HCP Engagement Impact study

Acknowledgements