“The pharma industry has long recognised the need to move from product based selling to more customer-centric and value-based engagements, but the COVID-19 pandemic has crystalised the urgency to deliver this change. Shifting trends in healthcare are adding to the diversity of customer needs, demanding a new and improved approach – a transformation of marketing and cross-functional customer engagement that is truly led by customer needs and focused on their experience (customer-led transformation).”
Study Objectives: Strategy& (part of the PwC network) leveraged Sermo’s research capabilities to gain targeted insights from 300+ GPs, Hem/Oncs, Cardiologists, and Neurologists in the UK, Germany and Italy to understand:
- HCPs’ virtual communication with patients and pharma representatives (pre/during/after COVID)
- HCPs’ value perception of their interactions with pharma companies
- HCPs’ usage of digital tools in day-to-day work, and more
Sermo physician insights were combined with Strategy& interviews with global and local pharma leaders and internal expertise to thoroughly analyze how pharma companies might drive customer-led transformation more holistically throughout their organisations. The full publication, entitled “Rise of the Customer Experience: Customer-Led Transformation in Pharma,” can be viewed here.
Key Learnings:
- A declining yet more strategic role for face-to-face engagements: three-quarters of physicians anticipate less frequent interactions with pharma in the future, and find value in only half of face-to-face contacts.
- Increasing engagement with digital channels, even among ‘traditionalists’ who in the past would defer to digital channels only as a last resort: up to 50 percent of patient consultations are expected to remain virtual in the future, and more than half of physicians already regularly use Google Search for questions about therapeutic products.
- Low usage of current pharma-sponsored portals and forums, suggesting an opportunity to provide more thought leadership and value-added resources (content beyond product-specific information).
How YOU can start your customer-lead transformation:
Strategy& research reveals that a differentiated customer experience will replace pharma’s traditional, share of voice-driven promotional model within five years – or even sooner. Pharma companies need to accelerate their transformation programs now and build capabilities to seamlessly link engaging and insight-driven digital marketing with high-speed, needs-based customer engagement.
To learn more about how pharma can anticipate and address not just current but also future customer needs, read Strategy&’s full publication here.
Source: Strategy& publication, “Rise of the customer experience; Customer–led transformation in pharma”, March 2021
About Strategy&
Strategy& is a global strategy consulting business uniquely positioned to help deliver your best future: one that is built on differentiation from the inside out and tailored exactly to you. As part of PwC, every day we’re building the winning systems that are at the heart of growth. We combine our powerful foresight with this tangible knowhow, technology, and scale to help you create a better, more transformative strategy from day one. As the only at-scale strategy business that’s part of a global professional services network, we embed our strategy capabilities with frontline teams across PwC to show you where you need to go, the choices you’ll need to make to get there, and how to get it right. The result is an authentic strategy process powerful enough to capture possibility, while pragmatic enough to ensure effective delivery. It’s the strategy that gets an organization through the changes of today and drives results that redefine tomorrow. It’s the strategy that turns vision into reality. It’s strategy, made real.
Hello, we’re Sermo! We appreciate you checking out our blog post written in partership with Strategy&: Pharma’s customer-led transformation uses physician insights. This exclusive content is part of our Success Stories series, where we highlight the latest and greatest ways healthcare businesses are driving stratgy using physician insights from Sermo.
We turn physician experience, expertise, and observations into actionable insights for the global healthcare community. Engaging with more than 1 million HCPs across 150 countries, we provide physicians with a social platform that fosters impactful peer-to-peer collaboration & discussions about issues that are important to them and their patients. Sermo offers on demand access to physicians via a suite of propietary technology to provide business intelligence that benefits pharmaceutical, healthcare partners and the medical community at large.
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