Customer engagement in the pharma industry

Our team supported an international pharmaceutical stakeholder in the digitalization of its interactions with its customers in the context of the health crisis. Beyond being a constraint, the Covid-19 crisis has enabled pharmaceutical industrial players to test multiple digital initiatives to maintain the relationship and engagement of their customers.

To help our client rethink their approach, we first detected the existing best practices internally within the Asia-Pacific teams, then analyzed cases of inspiring benchmarks in this area.

On this basis, we were able to co-construct with our client a concrete and specific action plan to strengthen its digital engagement actions for healthcare professionals and enable it to innovate on these subjects compared to its competitors.

Our client, sales director of a subsidiary of a leading pharmaceutical company, had ambitious goals for transforming its customer engagement model and was facing reluctance and concerns from its field forces, linked to the fear of seeing their role disappear or devalued in these new models. We supported our client in the organization and facilitation of several work sessions with the following objectives:

1. to explain the challenges of this necessary transformation
2. to inspire the sales teams about the importance of their role by projecting their development
3. to work together to build a roadmap for change.

Our project has enabled our client to unite its teams around this development and to clarify the stages of transformation towards a new customer engagement model.

Our client wanted to overhaul its engagement strategy with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and in particular rethink the nature of the content to be offered to these stakeholders. We began by redefining a segmentation of KOLs starting from their fundamental objectives and needs.

For each of the redefined segments, we then identified the key content to offer in a logical sequence of customer engagement, in particular by isolating the most original and innovative content to offer as well as the best formats to convey this content.

We ultimately selected 3 new concepts to offer (content + format) that were added to the business plan of our client’s “content factory”.

As part of an internal reorganization disrupting the organization of its promotional network, our client, a Business Unit Director of a pharma subsidiary, wanted to redefine the most effective promotional model to develop to maximize the performance of its customer engagement with constant resources.

To do this, we developed a 100% data science approach with the aim of making all of our client’s internal data speak for itself. We started by collecting and structuring all the available data (sales data, activity data, budget, etc.) in order to prepare our analysis. An econometric model then enabled us to answer the following three questions: which segments of prescribers have the most potential? What is the best engagement model to put in place with these segments? What is the best sales organization to capture the target potential?

Finally, and after having modeled different scenarios, we recommended to our client an optimal scenario, implemented since our project together.

We supported one of our clients, a pharmaceutical leader, in redesigning its engagement levers with its KOLs, with the aim of finalizing its medical engagement strategy and defining its content production needs.

For this project, our team first conducted targeted interviews with KOLs, to carry out a critical analysis of our client’s ‘personas’ and their journeys, leading to a redefinition of a segmentation based on engagement. Once the needs, expectations and uses of KOLs were mapped, our team organized workshops with our client’s teams in order to co-construct new engagement models.

Ultimately, we redesigned our client’s KOLs journeys, defined the key formats to focus on for the engagement of each segment and created a content production roadmap for the teams.

Alcimed supported an international pharmaceutical player in understanding the omni-channel customer journey of implanters, stroke neurologists, and nurses to develop new engagement opportunities towards implantable cardiac monitors (ICM) products & services.

To help our client build its strategy, we deciphered the customer journey of selected HCPs through a qualitative study, followed by a quantitative study based on the focus points identified in the qualitative phase, including the level of advocacy and loyalty towards ICMs, the level of awareness of ICMs, and the tendency to recommend ICMs to patients.

On this basis, we helped our client understand the actual complex communication landscape driving their customers’ decision-making and influence process towards ICMs products & services. We also assisted our client in identifying the right content, channels, and timing to boost loyalty, raise awareness, promote patient referrals among HCPs, and unlock the power of the new hybrid model (face-to-face field sales, remote sales, and digital platforms) to find new potential opportunities.

Our team supported an international pharmaceutical stakeholder specializing in allergy by defining their KOL (Key Opinion Leaders) engagement strategy from a medical perspective and exploring the DOL (Digital Opinion Leaders) ecosystem in allergy.

To assist our client in shaping their KOL engagement strategy, we leveraged their country teams’ knowledge of the ecosystem along with interviews with various KOLs worldwide to establish global personas (main KOLs’ profiles, habits, preferences and expectations). Additionally, we devised a methodology and practical tools to aid teams in more effectively identifying and comprehending key KOLs, as well as refining or challenging associated customer journeys to ensure alignment between KOLs’ expectations and needs and the company’s engagement objectives. Concurrently, we conducted a global exploratory investigation on DOLs to help our client stay updated and gain better insights into new players within their ecosystem.

On this basis, we enabled our client to define their medical engagement strategy and its implications in terms of medical activities at the country level. We also assessed the opportunity for our client to engage with DOLs in terms of value, objectives, and feasibility, within the context of communication and education.

In the context of a large pharmaceutical company developing an omnichannel suite to streamline healthcare professionals monitoring by their marketing teams, our team assisted our client in structuring and presenting this solution internally. The goal was to help the marketing teams better understand the capabilities offered by this internally developed tool.

To assist our client in the adoption of the omnichannel suite, we first outlined the engagement plan through discussions with the teams, aligning with the opportunities presented by the omnichannel suite and designing the specifications for the engagement journey (goals, key messages, message formats, success factors). We then developed training materials for the marketing teams based on these specifications. Finally, we implemented the engagement plan and defined the follow-up strategy to be implemented post-training.

This approach allowed us to demonstrate the usefulness of the omnichannel suite in their work, incorporate the voice of these teams into the process, and offer suitable formats for quick adoption of the content in an engaging manner.