Looking to build out or enhance your current CX strategy, but struggling with where to start? Tackling CX can be a daunting task, but we’re here to help. Check out Sermo’s philosophy – and what key learnings you can leverage to enhance your own strategy. Let’s dive in.
What is CX (Customer Experience)?
Customer Experience (CX) is the sum of all possible interactions with a company – from how you represent your company culture and values through to user experience. User Experience (UX) is just a part of CX, and User Interface (UI) is a facet of UX. Here’s a helpful visual to put everything into perspective:
Sermo approaches CX strategy with the following four tentpoles in mind:
1. Create a birds-eye view for the best perspective
Our mission is to galvanize, harness, and amplify the voice of physicians to move healthcare forward – so naturally, our CX strategy begins with the physician at the center. In the chart below, you’ll see how we take a holistic approach by looking at every single phase and potential physician interaction. We recommend creating something similar for your organization to provide a true “birds-eye view” that will ensure visibility and consistency across the user journey.
The phases and key touchpoints of our physicians’ CX include:
- Awareness: delighting physicians with impactful digital advertising, emails, landing pages, chatbot flows, in-person experiences and more, to clearly communicate the value prop of a Sermo membership
- Acquisition: creating a registration process that is efficient but also effective in maintaining the quality Sermo is known for
- Activation: providing an interesting and fun onboarding experience to get physicians excited about their new membership, and ensuring the privacy of our members
- Engagement: delivering impactful content and meaningful ways to interact to keep members coming back for more. New members are great, but engaged users are even better. Focusing on best-in-class customer service to help address needs and questions effectively is also paramount.
- Referral: partnering with members to communicate the value of Sermo to their own colleagues (and, they can earn along the way!)
2. Never stop getting to know your customers
As the leading provider of HCP insights, we always advocate to talk to, survey, and listen to your customers on an ongoing basis. Here are a few tips and tricks to get started:
- Quantitative and Qualitative Surveys: both methodologies are great ways to gain feedback on concept mocks, understand pain points, and determine what’s lacking or what needs to be enhanced. This research will help you target exactly how to evolve your platform or offering to continually meet the needs of your customers. Leveraging our quick turn insights platform, RealTime, we see physicians asking time and again for more educational content – Continuing Medical Education (CME), clinical trial information, and breaking medical news. These are “easy CX wins” driven by the voice of the customer. On the flip side, it’s equally important to read between the lines and take a thought-leadership approach: build on physician feedback, but also delight members with new features they didn’t even know they needed or wanted.
- Metrics, Metrics, Metrics: align internally on your key CX KPIs and make sure there is visibility to these metrics across your organization. Popular KPIs include CSAT (customer satisfaction) and NPS (net promoter score);here at Sermo we also focus on our churn rate as an indicator of how satisfied our members are with their experience. Make sure the amount of metrics you track is digestible and actionable too.
- Test and Optimize: there is no “right” answer unless you have some data to prove it! Deploy A/B tests and use the results to fine tune messaging, digital experiences, and more.
- Keep your eye on the future prize: in addition to optimizing what you have now, keep a running roadmap of new features and capabilities to support the varying types of members and their needs. For example, our roadmap factors in new builds for recent medical school grads, physicians thinking about retirement and content creators.
3. Doctors are people too – take an empathetic approach
We know our doctors. We know they’re busy, we know they’re stressed, and we know they need our support. Our entire CX is built to address and resolve their unique challenges. For example:
| Physician Challenge | Sermo CX Solution |
| Feeling isolated, alone, stressed | Connect with like-minded peers; allow physicians to communicate globally as if they’re in the break room |
| Difficulties with patient cases | Provide a real-time crowdsourcing platform |
| Need to stay up to date in their specialty | Deliver the best in medical content & news |
| Medical school debt, bills | Earn extra cash through surveys & fun promotions |
4. Communicate what you stand for – and live it out loud
Customers nowadays choose to engage with brands not only for their services, but increasingly for what a company represents. Here’s how we show up for…
- Our people: we offer meaningful perks, have open lines of communication internally, and make it fun to connect as a global & virtual company
- The world: we conduct global HCP studies like the COVID-19 Barometer to help educate the public and give a loud voice to physicians on the frontlines. This year we’ve also donated $50,000 to local charities that are near and dear to our employees’ hearts from the ASPCA to Smile Foundation NGO.
At the end of the day, the success of your CX strategy is dependent on truly understanding your customers and keeping their best interests in mind always. Meet your customers where they are, listen to their needs, and anticipate their wants, and you’ll be sure to have some CX successes under your belt in no time.
