One of the most encouraging signs of progress in Pharma is the addition of C-suite level Customer or Patient Officers. While the impact of this new position remains to be seen, making a change at the top is a good start (see blog post, “Chief Customer Officers: Fancy New Title or Path to Meaningful Change”).
One of the most encouraging signs of progress in Pharma is the addition of C-suite level Customer or Patient Officers. While the impact of this new position remains to be seen, making a change at the top is a good start (see blog post, “Chief Customer Officers: Fancy New Title or Path to Meaningful Change”).
But it may take some time for C-Suite initiatives to trickle down. Meanwhile, what can be done at the brand level? Here are three ways to jumpstart customer focus on your brand:
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1. Create unified view of all customer feedback and interactions: Outside of Pharma, this practice is known as “capturing the voice of the customer.” Marketers go outside their functional silo and collect information from any department that has customer contact. In pharmaceuticals, this should include digging into Adverse Event Reports, long the providence of the Safety and Medical departments. A unified view of the customer is created by collecting the following information in one place:
- Incoming customer contacts. For added texture, your call center can enable you to periodically listen in on calls
- Survey information. Does anyone beyond the brand manager responsible for CRM see the CRM survey responses?
- Social networks and community conversations. Are your social listening exercises widely distributed and meaningfully communicated?
Once the information has been sourced, there are many companies that can help you automate the data collection for a real time view of your customer interactions.
2. Interact with customers every chance you get: Vertex was particularly good at this. They did everything from regularly having patients visit their office for small group meetings to spending full-blown research weekends with patients. It is one thing to read that your patients have trouble with basic life-skills and another to get a panicked call from the patient at 7 am because she is worried about her hotel bill.
3. Change your metrics to reward customer centricity. The time has come for the pharma industry to adopt the net promoter score, which measures the degree to which customers would recommend your brand to a friend or a colleague. Extensive research across industries demonstrates that as the net promoter score goes up, so do sales and margin growth. Changing metrics will change behavior. Marketers will be incentivized and rewarded for solving customer problems rather than producing pretty PowerPoint presentations. Right now, Marketers serving the needs of internal customers, like the Field Force, get more recognition than those meeting external customer needs.
Customer focus isn’t intuitive for pharmaceutical companies. Many brand managers aren’t even allowed to attend customer research in person any more. While all the rest of health care is focused on getting closer to the customer, it often seems that Pharma does everything they can to separate their marketers from their customers. That has to change at all levels from the C-Suite to the brand manager.
