Customer Experiences – It’s a strange time in pharmaceutical marketing. Just when most industries are finding it easier to reach customers than ever before, pharma companies are finding it more difficult. As drugs fall off the patent cliff, marketing budgets are being slashed. As regulators get tougher, marketers are losing access to healthcare professionals. And the dawn of the internet age has put unprecedented power in the hands of customers – they’ve learned to ignore online advertising, are deserting print publications in droves, and have a whole new set of trusted sources online that just won’t take advertising from pharmaceutical companies.

When it comes to ‘process’, it’s important to simplify the steps a customer needs to take to access a product or use a service. For example, it is difficult to get patients involved in support program because they are typically enrolled by a healthcare provider if they have time, requiring completing and sending in a form. One interesting approach I’ve seen that simplifies this was to put a barcode on a product’s packaging that patients scan to enroll in the support program, so they could do it in one step at home instead of many steps at the doctor’s office.

Customer experiences for pharma companies, exceptional customer experience gives pharma companies the chance to differentiate themselves from competitors radically. Pharma companies are slowly realizing that customer experience is the way to address these difficulties. The problem is that pharma doesn’t really ‘get’ customer experience.

Customer experience strategy
A great customer experience strategy focuses your efforts and resources where they will have the most impact for your business. Yet too many pharma strategies for customer experience fail to focus these efforts in any meaningful way. Doing everything for everyone is not a strategy that works.

The easiest way to start is focusing your strategy. focus on a very specific set of target customers. Your limited resources are shrinking and it’s a bad idea to try to reach all healthcare professionals who might use your product, or even a broad subset like GPs. Instead, identify a specific group of target customers so your strategy has a chance to mean something to them. In our engagements with pharma, we see very little evidence of this.