This blog post is an extension of our recent webinar discussion: “Continuous Improvement with AI: Connecting Customer Engagement Strategies to Impact,” part of our 6-part Omnichannel Innovation Webinar Series.
In today’s rapidly evolving life sciences landscape, sustaining true omnichannel engagement has become increasingly challenging. Many teams struggle to maintain the momentum required to keep these initiatives effective and impactful. In a recent webinar, we explored three key principles that are essential for life sciences teams if they wish to succeed in this complex environment.
- Codifying Business Objectives by Aligning Business Goals with AI-Driven Tactics
The first and perhaps most critical principle is the alignment between business goals and tactics. This concept, while seemingly obvious, is often overlooked. The disconnect between strategic objectives and the technological tools designed to achieve them can be a significant barrier to success.
One common issue is that business teams are usually involved only at the initial stages of a project. This limited engagement can result in AI initiatives that don’t fully serve the intended business goals, leading to a lack of clarity on the return on investment (ROI) from these technologies.
To overcome this, the key is to digitize brand objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) into a system that drives consistent patterns of behavior. This process must be simple and intuitive, allowing all stakeholders to contribute to and understand the overarching strategy. By synthesizing these goals into a coordinated set of priorities, teams can ensure that engagement is amplified consistently across both digital and field channels.
- Continuous Measurement by Embracing Continuous Activity
The second key principle is the importance of continuous activity. In many pharmaceutical companies, planning and impact reviews occur infrequently, often only once a year. This sporadic approach is insufficient for maintaining effective engagement strategies in an industry as dynamic as life sciences.
Life sciences companies can set up for much more success with continuous tracking of KPIs through purpose-built user interfaces (UI). This method of ongoing monitoring allows for real-time understanding of where impact is being made and, equally importantly, where it is not. With continuous tracking, life sciences teams can gain a clearer picture of strategy effectiveness, enabling them to make timely adjustments and improve ROI.
- Proactive Interventions by Fostering Continuous Improvement
The final principle is the focus on continuous improvement. Measuring progress is essential, but it’s not enough on its own. Customer engagement strategies often falter because teams cannot quickly discern what is working and what isn’t. This delay can result in missed opportunities to make necessary adjustments before it’s too late.
Sustained impact needs real-time responsiveness, and if the right inputs and constraints are provided, improvements can be automated with AI continually refining tactics based on KPI targeting.
For example, AI-generated proactive nudges for both field-based and headquarters-based teams can be used to help improve overall effectiveness by encouraging timely adjustments and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
What the Industry is Seeking
We spent over six months interviewing senior leaders in top pharmaceutical organizations across Europe, the US, and APAC. Through in-depth interviews, prototype iterations, and continuous resonance testing, we gained valuable insights into the challenges and needs of these leaders.
One of the key takeaways was the need for quick visibility into personalized KPIs that matter most to brand and commercial leaders. They expressed a desire not only to understand the progress on these KPIs, but also to dive deeper into why certain strategies were impacting these metrics in specific ways. This understanding is necessary for making real-time, responsive adjustments to strategies.
Additionally, leaders emphasized the importance of agility in change management. In an omnichannel world, where personalized journeys are more granular than ever, the ability to pivot quickly is especially meaningful. AI can support this by prioritizing the most valuable actions, balancing customer value, action cost, and channel constraints.
Our Response: Aktana Strategy Console
Aktana recently released a new product called Strategy Console which simplifies the process of connecting customer engagement strategies to impact. With Strategy Console, brand, commercial, and medical leaders can identify integral connections between omnichannel strategies and regional brand performance.
How Strategy Console Delivers
Strategy Console offers a set of comprehensive strategies and KPIs tailored to a brand’s stage, region, and data availability.
- Sales-Focused Strategies: Whether you need to protect market share from a new competitor or capitalize on a formulary win, we have the strategy for you. These strategies are ideal for newly launched brands, indications, or those under competitive pressure.
- Pre-Calculated KPIs: These KPIs work with your data to measure the progress of your strategies, ensuring that you’re always on track. This creates a closed-loop system that serves as a reliable source of truth, guiding your decisions.
- Field Impact Strategies: Whether you have a well-defined target list or need to expand it, these strategies can help improve goal attainment, coordination, and insight collection. This ensures that field knowledge is effectively shared across teams.
- Omnichannel Experience Strategies: From driving digital campaigns to ensuring consistent content usage across channels, these strategies help improve coordination and effectiveness across your entire omnichannel ecosystem.
With our comprehensive set of strategies and pre-calculated KPIs, customers are equipped with an easy-to-use tool that evolves and improves over time. They have the flexibility to choose from a combination of methods to generate actions aligned with their strategy—whether through their own preferred tactics or rules, the Aktana Tactic Library, AI, customer engagement journeys, or their own models.
This approach allows blending of different methods to achieve the desired outcomes. For optimization, it’s important to adopt a measured approach, especially with new technologies. Our system allows this by simulating outputs to validate the guardrails. However, the focus should be on validating these guardrails rather than controlling the output. The goal is to ensure everything feels right—or at least doesn’t feel wrong—enabling the learning cycle as early as possible. This is vital for innovation, especially given the rapid pace at which life sciences enterprises are moving.
Strategy Console can help measure and set targets across channels, brands and teams, then generate tactics that drive continuous improvements in KPIs in just four to six weeks.
Learn more about Continuous Improvement with AI and Aktana’s Strategy Console by watching our webinar with Jeremy Flax, Aktana Vice President of Product Strategy and Sandeep Kapoor, Aktana Senior Director of Product Management: “Continuous Improvement with AI: Connecting Customer Engagement Strategies to Impact”
