The quality of the customer and employee experience is increasingly becoming a decisive competitive factor for companies in the life sciences sector. On the path towards greater customer, patient and employee centricity, organizations must not only introduce new tools and methods for data collection and processing, but also align parts of their own organization accordingly.

When the patient began to speak

If you are looking for the point in time when customer or patient centricity became the central paradigm for companies in the healthcare industry, you have to look to 2020. As if under a magnifying glass, numerous trends and developments in the life sciences sector accumulated and accelerated in the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Interaction with customers and patients was affected in several ways:

On the one hand, the widespread vaccine debate has led to an unprecedented debate among broad sections of the population about the medical products on offer. The emergence of these self-determined patients is the harbinger of a new generation of patients who are increasingly actively engaging with treatment methods, manufacturers and their products through freely accessible information and are thus becoming more of a focus for manufacturers. On the other hand, the example of accelerated vaccine development made it clear that the innovation cycles for medical products have shortened and that the number of market launches will continue to increase in the future – also in the course of more personalized forms of therapy. This increases the complexity for patients and, above all, for medical decision-makers to obtain the necessary product information at the right time via the right channel. In addition, new forms of communication and touchpoints between manufacturers and medical decision-makers have been established in the course of the contact restrictions during the pandemic, which will increasingly replace traditional information and sales channels, especially among the digitally savvy HCPs who are moving up.

"The coronavirus pandemic has shown us how the information needs of doctors and patients are changing."

As a result of all these developments, the experiences that patients, doctors and employees have with products and their manufacturers along their patient or customer journey are becoming more diverse and increasingly important. In other words, customer or patient centricity is becoming a decisive competitive factor and a key differentiator for life sciences companies in an increasingly dynamic market.

The future of life sciences is customer-centric and experience-driven

Surveys of life sciences organizations worldwide show that this development is not just a temporary consequence of the pandemic but will change the industry permanently. According to these surveys, improving the customer experience is the most important business priority for every second company in the coming years.^[1]

As a result, companies need to rethink large parts of their marketing, sales and HR processes in order to remain attractive to customers and employees in the long term. This ranges from implementing a comprehensive omnichannel strategy to inform doctors about new medical products in a more targeted and individualized way to improving the experience that employees have with the company. Companies that succeed in this not only achieve demonstrably higher customer and employee loyalty, higher sales and increased customer lifetime value (CLV). A customer-centric approach also opens up new business potential along the patient journey - for example in the form of accompanying healthcare apps or similar.

Read here the article XM Explained.

Experience management as a mandatory discipline in the future competitive environment

The basis for consistently aligning your own processes with the needs of patients, customers or employees is a comprehensive understanding of the respective target groups. Life sciences companies already have large amounts of data at their disposal. However, internal data and system silos need to be broken down in order to use them effectively. New data sources outside the company also need to be tapped into. In particular, this includes so-called experience data, which results from the experiences that customers have at various touchpoints along their journey.

Gaining these valuable stakeholder insights, linking them to the information available in the company and translating them into measurable process improvements is the core of professional experience management. When implemented correctly, it provides the basis for a 360° view of the management of customer, employee, partner, product and brand experiences.

Regulation as a key challenge

The life sciences industry is still in the early stages of systematically acquiring and processing customer insights. One reason: In Germany in particular, access to potential customers is heavily regulated by laws such as the Therapeutic Products Advertising Act and the GDPR. On the one hand, this applies to approaching patients and medical decision-makers (HCPs) and obtaining their opinions via various touchpoints. On the other hand, the reporting obligations resulting from the responses. These requirements place high demands on the design of meaningful and at the same time legally compliant insight strategies in the life sciences environment. Companies are operating in a narrow context here and have to deal with a high level of complexity. In order to be able to establish effective experience management, a very differentiated approach and in-depth industry expertise are required when designing a viable insights strategy, depending on the target group and business model.

Restructuring the organization

In addition to these regulatory aspects, life sciences companies are faced with the task of aligning their organization to a customer-centric way of working. For many manufacturers, consistently aligning corporate activities with customer and patient needs means a comprehensive transformation that affects the organization at various levels: structurally, it is important to break down established data silos and establish experience management as a cross-functional discipline - without losing speed and effectiveness. In terms of processes, effective workflows must be developed that enable the rapid transfer of stakeholder feedback into entrepreneurial action and continuous feedback in the sense of an agile approach. Finally, companies should not underestimate the cultural dimension. This is because topics such as the expansion of digital sales channels have the potential to question the self-image of functions such as sales, marketing or HR and thus generate resistance among the workforce.

"When the customer learns to speak, the organization must be able to listen."

 

Holistic approach for successful experience management

Successfully shaping this change requires a holistic approach which, beyond the technical implementation, should initially include a thorough analysis of objectives, target groups and legal framework conditions as well as intensive support for the introduction through employee training and comprehensive change management.

As an end-to-end partner for the realization of experience management solutions, msg industry advisors has developed a process model that supports companies from the life sciences sector in setting up their experience management platform.

A structured maturity analysis, which shows the status quo of your own organization in terms of dimensions such as XM mindset, understanding and technological maturity, can be a useful first step in determining the need for support with regard to an introduction.

Learn more here.

Conclusion

Driven by current industry developments, the ability to recognize target group needs and translate them into high-quality customer, product or employee experiences is increasingly becoming a decisive competitive factor for companies in the life sciences sector. Successful experience management requires not only the technological prerequisites for gaining and combining customer insights, but also an in-depth analysis of the industry-specific application area and close monitoring of the change process.

msg industry advisors support companies in the chemical, pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors with a tried-and-tested approach to the successful planning and implementation of their experience management strategy.

^[1] Harvard Business Review (2020): https://hbr.org/resources/pdfs/comm/salesforce/SalesforceCXLifeSciences.pdf