Written by David Logue, Chief Commercial Officer at Aktana
The evolving customer and stakeholder landscape demands more than just personalized content and an HCP portal – it calls for a collaborative value-driven approach. Something that can facilitate seamless collaboration between field reps, MSLs and other customer-facing teams. Tools that help the teams with alerts and suggestions in realtime to enable swift responses to customer needs, ensuring a unified and personalized customer experience.
Unlocking the Power of Omnichannel Orchestration and Personalized Interactions
The importance of omnichannel orchestration cannot be overstated when it comes to personalizing HCP engagement. Merely capturing data and feeding it into NBA solutions is insufficient; the crucial step is the activation of intelligence to make the data meaningful and actionable.
Omnichannel orchestration, also known as contextual marketing, identifies the unique needs of individual physicians or stakeholders during specific touchpoints and ensures they’re aligned. This assists life science organizations to deliver personalized content to the right channels at the right time. Contextually logical Next Best Experience recommendations, intelligently curated and ranked, provide additional context to encourage user action.
Drawing on our experience with Aktana’s AI-driven platform, integrated with every life sciences data source and key player in a pharma organization’s commercial tech stack, we witness a transformation of vast datasets into clear recommendations seamlessly delivered into how teams work today. By infusing intelligence across the entire omnichannel ecosystem, it ensures that each customer journey becomes a continuous, coherent conversation—frictionless, timely, and consistently relevant.
Now imagine these insights empowering field teams via mobile at every step of their routine. Timely nudges and reminders significantly enhancing desired behaviors such as effectively capturing key points from discussions and prompt follow-ups. The contextual delivery of nudges based on predefined triggers, such as upcoming meetings, insights from past meetings, and user location, empowers customer-facing teams to craft personalized and actionable engagement plans for individual Healthcare Professionals (HCPs).
By fostering data-driven behaviors within customer-facing teams, we not only boost the likelihood of successful implementation of personalized engagement strategies, but also enable the establishment of meaningful connections with HCPs. The seamless access to HCP-centric data propels customer-facing teams to gather more comprehensive customer insights, take action on a higher percentage of those insights, and ultimately achieve superior performance in customer engagement.
Boosting productivity of customer-facing teams with real-time recommendations using AI
Relevancy is a key demand when it comes to HCP engagement across all stakeholders.Once we have secured the time and attention of a Healthcare Professional (HCP), the primary objective during every subsequent interaction is evident: they prioritize content that enhances their ability to serve patients effectively. According to an Accenture survey, half of the recently deemed “best content” by HCPs comprises materials either easily shareable with their patients for support or content aiding them in the administrative aspects of patient treatment.
The key aspect of delivering relevant content is about timing and anticipating the HCP needs with better call planning exercises. As the HCPs receive targeted content through their preferred channels, commercial field teams can create a continuous and relevant customer narrative. This orchestrated approach transforms routine touchpoints into meaningful interactions, adding value to every message received.
The shift towards pull-based engagement is further emphasized as HCPs gain the ability to connect with pharma field teams on-demand. Whether seeking clarifications from Medical Science Liaisons or requesting personalized content from field reps, HCPs are empowered to initiate interactions that align with their unique requirements. This also makes the position of field reps and customer-facing teams indispensable as ‘Trusted Advisors to the HCPs’; creating a truly personalized customer journey to enhance customer satisfaction and fostering long-term relationships.
Adopting a True Omnichannel Approach with Aktana Copilot
While the idea of a true omnichannel experience is appealing, it’s very hard to achieve especially in the pharma industry. Often working in silos with different rules and regulations, providing a unified experience to the HCP needs to have a collaborative & co-ordinated system at the customer-facing end. This involves curating a unified experience across multiple channels and optimizing content based on channel, device, and consumer interests.
Empowering the field force is paramount, achieved by mapping customer journeys, and understanding their interests, behavior, and past interactions to create a comprehensive 360-degree view.
This is where Aktana Copilot plays a pivotal role in this evolution by fostering seamless collaboration between field reps, MSLs and other customer-facing teams. Real-time alerts and suggestions in the pocket of team members enable swift responses to customer needs, ensuring a unified and personalized customer experience.
For instance, as HCPs express interest in specific studies or therapeutic areas during field visits, Aktana Copilot captures and integrates this data into the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The rep can then orchestrate the HCP’s customized journey based on their needs and follow up with relevant emails, content and event invitations, creating a personalized experience that adds value to every interaction.
A connected omnichannel system empowers field reps to coordinate between MSLs, Key Account Managers, and Marketing Teams communicating with the same HCP via different channels. If the ultimate goal of an omnichannel approach is improving customer engagement, Aktana Copilot establishes a one-stop shop for all customers and a unified system of record for all commercial teams. This frictionless experience holds the key to driving higher interactions and engagement, ushering in a new era of customer-centric pharmaceutical engagement.