The future of customer engagement in biopharma

Innovation is driving excitement and opportunity in biopharma. Over the past three decades, there’s been a rapid rise in specialty drugs – growing from roughly ten on the US market to 671 FDA-approved biologics today. In 2024, the European Medicines Agency recommended 114 drugs for marketing authorisation, including 46 new active substances and 15 orphan drugs supporting treatments for rare diseases.

These groundbreaking treatments offer new hope for patients to live longer and healthier lives. But ensuring patients benefit from them requires more than robust drug development pipelines. Securing patient access and improving outcomes demands that traditional engagement models evolve.

Today’s engagement strategies often fall short of getting relevant messages and offerings to market. Functional silos and conventional ways of working only make this harder, adding inefficiency and cost while reducing impact. As a result, many biopharmas are re-examining traditional engagement models to identify disconnects that prevent optimal customer experiences. Focused and sustained investment in coordinated engagement helps address the complex, growing needs of healthcare systems and healthcare professionals (HCPs).

Patient volumes are rising and clinicians burdened by administrative duties are expected to adjust quickly to steep learning curves that accompany new treatments, combinations and diagnostics. At the same time, organisations are tasked with relearning the best engagement strategies for an increasingly diverse, harder-to-access set of stakeholders.

But there’s good reason for optimism – most HCPs see biopharmas as an important source of treatment information and prescribing support. The industry has an opportunity to supply customers with timely information, guidance and value-added services. This demands new ways of working across sales, marketing, medical, market access and services. Veeva Pulse data shows that when commercial teams deliver connected, coordinated scientific information and resources that build off the last interaction, it deepens HCP relationships, mitigates challenging access and improves treatment adoption.

Customer connectivity is a critical differentiator and a competitive advantage for companies that succeed at it. However, this state of operation – maintaining a consistently positive customer experience – means being ever-relevant and responsive, engaging customers on their terms. Building trust and ensuring reliability calls for connected engagement.

Connected companies predict, pre-empt and coordinate relevant customer responses. Because customer journeys aren’t linear, a deeper understanding of customers’ unique journeys is required – knowing where they are on the path to achieving a goal and responding quickly and effectively every time. Often, connected teams mobilise resources around the right value proposition at the right time – from answering questions via instant messaging to participating in a shared-value initiative.

Achieving this level of customer connectivity requires optimal cross-functional alignment. Reorienting around a common purpose, like progressing a customer along the journey – and backing it up with measures of experience, satisfaction and impact – can help drive the coordination needed to succeed.

Beyond enhanced customer experience, connected engagement delivers significant business value. Precise coordination makes teams more efficient and eliminates wasted resources on unnecessary or redundant actions. Connected engagement also promotes customer conversion with the potential to change or reinforce desirable behaviours – critical to driving faster uptake and, ultimately, growing sales.

Many leading biopharmas have already made significant and necessary investments in customer-centricity’s underlying enablers – technology, data and analytics platforms. The next, and perhaps most difficult, step is using these capabilities to connect teams effectively. Companies must create an integrated and connected platform that leverages AI and injects analytics into existing workflows.

With AI, biopharmas have a significant opportunity to mine their unique data and own their models. Call reports, CRM data, customer feedback and process metrics are rich data sources that can feed AI engines to unlock productivity gains. Combining this with external data sources such as claims or industry call pressure data can turbo-charge an organisation’s AI strategy.

Organisational readiness for this next phase varies on the availability and quality of data and the degree to which companies plan to integrate the tools and resulting insights into existing workflows. In cases where they are well integrated, teams can easily understand and act on the insights to augment decisions.

Driving change requires retraining years of muscle memory. It takes focus, effort, new skills and different ways of measuring and rewarding performance. Biopharmas that integrate change management into their commercial excellence journeys – by training and empowering employees – will reap the rewards of enhanced customer experience: mutual value exchange; improved treatment adoption and better patient outcomes.

Learn more about why connected engagement is the future of customer engagement in biopharma.