Breaking down the barriers

Liberating omnichannel’s full potential

By Danny Buckland

Not many people would pay for a ticket to a concert where their seat was positioned behind a pillar and directly below the auditorium’s grumbling air-conditioning vent. The white noise and restricted vision would be enough to render the whole transaction worthless and futile.

Digital advances offer an opportunity to put healthcare professionals (HCPs) in the best seat in the house, with the content of their choice, but too often the experience has been off-key because of omnichannel confusion and overload.

However, orchestrating omnichannel engagement is creating amplified impact across a range of touchpoints, thanks to intelligence-driven data management and system design that is enhancing customer experience.

Connecting with precision and efficiency is now critical, as almost 70% of HCPs are digital natives with high levels of tech dependency and expectation, while 57% of HCPs prefer omnichannel engagement with pharma.

“Omnichannel has existed as a concept in industry for a while but it is growing very quickly now and we are seeing the V2 and V3 versions developing and I’m working with big pharma clients who are invested in getting omnichannel rolled out and working smoothly,” says Audrey Gent, Client Strategy Director at Kanga Healthcare, a full service digital agency that works with pharmaceutical and healthcare companies to embed transformative CX (Customer Experience) practice across the organisation.

“We have the tools and digital capability to make omnichannel work and the potential is exciting.”

Hitting the sweet notes of an individual HCP’s clinical needs, engagement preferences and attention windows is becoming more achievable with advanced analytics, yet the temptation to jump on every digital opportunity can result in pharma almost “pecking HCPs” to distraction, observes Audrey. There is no need to overload them as omnichannel now has the capacity for engagements to be selective and meaningful, she says.

Optimising omnichannel results still has its challenges, with a need to upskill teams, invest in data generation, analysis and application, along with a C-suite driven commitment to remove silos that restrict the full use of assets, whether that’s data, staff expertise or historical corporate knowledge.

‘Connecting with precision and efficiency is now critical, as almost 70% of HCPs are digital natives with high levels of tech dependency and expectation’

“It is not just getting close to customers, looking at their CX and trying to tailor your content in the right channel at the right time for them – it’s a much bigger learning curve, managing data, looking at that data and using it to iterate and understand how to improve,” adds Audrey. “So, there are a lot of challenges around the upskilling of what are predominantly product managers who haven’t necessarily got a marketing background.

“You should aspire to be more omnichannel because there is a lot more connectivity than there has ever been, and it is achievable within budgetary confines, no matter the size of your organisation. Those that do it well are the ones that do the change management piece very well.”

New skills, underpinned by corporate intent and infused with relevant data, can liberate field teams to connect with HCPs at a deeper, lasting level and stand out in the sandstorms of information. It also helps organisations identify times when HCPs are in transactional and receptive modes.

“When we work on patient-based campaigns, whether that’s disease awareness or actual patient engagement and support campaigns, we endeavour to have the same approach with payers and HCPs, which is driven by the empathy of understanding their pain points and making sure any interaction with us as an organisation is as friction-free as possible,” says Audrey.

“One of the exciting elements is that it frees up marketeers to effectively implement omnichannel using the data that’s available to make informed decisions. We can layer onto this the effective use of qualitative insights fed in by customers to enable true personalisation of interactions with individuals.”

The benefits radiate way beyond engaged HCPs, energising cross-departmental collaboration and efficiency. “We are working with a client with a new product in an underserved therapy area. The omnichannel framework has already been moved from commercial across into medical and we are working with the market access team, so omnichannel is being applied right along the product life cycle with multiple benefits,” says Audrey. “Some pharma companies are starting to have a light bulb moment around the potential here.

“Another client that has done a lot of omnichannel work has introduced huddles for proper cross-functional working where they sit down and analyse what they have put out there and look for key learnings that they can iterate very quickly. It’s important to understand that a lot of people are uncomfortable with data and what it tells them, but once you predigest it and take the pain away and show what has worked, you can move forward quickly and be agile and responsive to HCP needs.”

Omnichannel needs to break through the compliance and budget signatory barriers in many organisations, and Audrey comments: “We have the digital tools to meet these challenges and what we can do in terms of key moments, such as leveraging next best action or journey orchestration, can really help marketeers.

“We really want to empower organisations to have productive relationships with HCPs – using the right data at the right times enables that. It is so important to be as personalised as possible – otherwise, in such a crowded field, they will just hit Unsubscribe.”

HCPs, payers, principal investigators and regulators all have testimonies about being bombarded with substandard, unsolicited and ill-directed content that causes them to, at best, ignore or, at worse, judge the corporate source negatively.

“They expect the same consumer grade experience [they get] from Netflix and Amazon in their professional environment,” says Florian Schnappauf, Vice President of Enterprise Commercial Strategy at Veeva Europe. “It is a high bar, but it also means they accept an omnichannel approach such as digital and remote engagement channels because they are used to it.

“The real and significant change in omnichannel has been the evolution of pull channels from HCPs who expect their questions to be satisfied more immediately than in the past. This bidirectional communication – from HCP to pharma as well as pharma to HCP – creates a huge response from HCPs and that opens up opportunities for more dialogue and broader relationships across the business, while also building trust.”

Research from Veeva, a leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry, reveals that HCPs initiate conversations via compliant chat channels 30% of the time, with field teams able to respond to queries within five minutes.

It is a telling statistic.

“That pull mechanism is huge because, until only recently, 100% of interactions between pharma and HCPs were initiated by pharma,” adds Florian. “A few things need to come together to take advantage of this. You need to have the channel that enables you to respond quickly, which could be chat or video, and you need the right content available to share quickly.

“Teams that work with HCPs should also be connected themselves; when an HCP asks a scientific or medical question, the sales representative may not be able to answer it, so they need to be connected into the ecosystem to react and pull in the right resource to provide the right information quickly.

“HCPs need timely knowledge of treatment options so that they can make the right prescribing decisions fast, sometimes even when the patient is in the room. So, if they reach out, they want immediate responses.

‘We really want to empower organisations to have productive relationships with HCPs – using the right data at the right times enables that’

“The ultimate benefit is that it enables true customer-centricity, which helps differentiate an organisation in increasingly crowded markets. As more complex medicines come onto the market, bringing different functions – predominantly sales, marketing and medical – together more seamlessly gives you a competitive edge.”

A 12-month Veeva Engage Connect pilot with Boehringer Ingelheim demonstrated the potency of developing relationships via omnichannel with results showing reps and HCPs shared more than 500 messages and more than 150 content pieces, with a 60% click-through rate and a 43% HCP response rate.

Pharma is trying to shed its conservative skin and Florian observes: “Change is difficult and particularly in large pharmaceutical companies where, in many cases, each silo has a decision-making power and budget. When changes are made, successful leaders will commit to bringing everyone closer together through training and rewards programmes.”

It is clear that data can be a unifying force in a world of advancing medical capacity to tackle rare and previously untreatable diseases and an accelerant to greater personalisation in an era of technological acceptance and expectance.

“Pharmaceutical companies need to be able to work with much smaller patient segments, and the HCPs who serve these patients in the future,” says Florian. “We believe in enabling a single customer platform that works across all the functions that touch HCPs, so that sales, marketing and medical teams are connected and looking at the same data. It helps them contribute to the full picture and respond much more quickly to the needs of the doctors and, ultimately, to those of the patient. This can drive widespread benefit and is hugely exciting.”

He accepts that software and data are only part of the challenge, but maintains they offer a swift route to improved internal collaboration and an enhanced ability to innovate and scale pilots rapidly across brands and therapeutic markets.

Veeva is developing a Common Data Architecture for Life Sciences, which it will publish under public licence, to establish a standard taxonomy for life sciences data sets to override the bumps of different systems struggling with terminology as well as process.

“A customer told me recently that his data teams are spending 60% of their time on cleaning data sets and reformatting them so they can bring them together, and only then can they start drawing insights. So 60% of the time is spent on that and 40% is spent on insights gathering. Our Common Data Architecture addresses this problem so that all data sets follow a standard taxonomy and can snap into each other so you can immediately start to work on the insights.”

Omnichannel is the force of the moment, with only 9% of respondents to a Graphite Digital 2024 survey of senior executives yet to adopt the approach. But the same research also revealed that the boost to customer engagement was yet to materialise for 80% of respondents, citing internal friction as a major hindrance.

The case for omnichannel progress, it appears, is intertwined with the complexities of creating organisational change in challenging financial times.

References are available on request.

Danny Buckland is a freelance journalist specialising in the healthcare industry