44-45 - Rules of engagement

For David Styles, Inflammation business unit director, Amgen UK, customer engagement is about a partnership based on value, understanding and consistency. There’s still a long way to go to achieve this but there are several factors driving its evolution. “Technology now allows us to communicate a much broader, integrated point of view. We are also becoming more sophisticated in understanding customer needs and their real-world challenges, currently the post-pandemic world and structural changes in the NHS.”

Nathan Morris, Women’s Health business unit director, Gedeon Richter, believes that effective customer engagement needs a change of attitude towards segmentation and prioritisation. “Traditionally we have focused on the most attractive customer accounts. That can lead to deprioritising the customers who are already engaged, who are saying, ‘help me’, ‘support me’.” Businesses need to start with asking who the customer is rather than who they want them to be.

Louise Bauldry, business insights and analytics lead, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), argues for a holistic approach. “Customers have a general impression of an organisation and an affinity to a brand or a service and that customer mindset is more important than ever.” A successful customer relationship is dependent upon the organisation aligning its teams and people behind the customer, and those that fail to do so could lose customers overnight simply due to the actions or behaviour of one individual or team.

There is some scepticism about the industry’s level of commitment to customer-centricity, a topic that’s been around for a long time without necessarily showing up in changed behaviours, planning processes or strategic trade-offs. Morris makes the point: “As an industry, everyone has learnt to ‘talk the talk’, to say the right thing… but what still makes people think I’m doing a great job is the pounds, shillings and pence they generate.” The industry, he admits, is working hard to define a new approach but, “like any culture change, you have got to want it, invest in it and make concessions elsewhere to build it.” That can mean accepting a potentially lean period, as defined by other parameters, while you prove your commitment and credibility to a new way of working.

Bauldry feels part of the problem is the perceived success of the traditional share-of-voice model that has not changed for decades although “it was starting to be questioned, long before COVID, as a result of customer expectations changing more broadly.” That doesn’t mean to say the traditional model is no longer fit for purpose. “It’s a question of how you apply it and that depends on so many factors – the competitive environment, the landscape, how mature the brand is, how much you are prepared to invest, and your target audience. One size no longer fits all. You need to think carefully about your engagement model and approach for a particular brand and particular customers.”

For Morris, COVID has broken the taboo that surrounds the subject of regulation. “Previously, no-one wanted to stand up and say that we are over-regulated as an industry and that this has stood in the way of positive change.” COVID has shown the value of self-regulation. He recognises the dangers but is confident in the industry’s understanding of risk and benefit. “If we significantly de-regulated there will be times as an industry where we get it wrong, but additional positive contributions will far outweigh those that show the industry in a bad light.” He thinks there is still too much focus on restriction and not enough on the benefits deregulation could release for the customer.

One of the biggest changes the pandemic made for Styles was to review how and when to interact with customers. “We had an opportunity to test new ways of working in real time – what channels were working and what content was adding the most value. This was also the time to be more dynamic with our resourcing – different parts of the country were more open for business than others and therefore we could flex our engagement accordingly.”

Once the lessons have been learned, he expects to see a new set of key performance indicators (KPIs), ones that better reflect the diverse nature of customers and local challenges and the subsequent need to have more tailored engagement plans – one size doesn’t fit all.

Styles believes that, given the continuing reduction in face-to-face interaction with customers and their rising expectations, the industry needs to move towards a partner/value model that optimises key account management (KAM) activity. “We will have to sacrifice some commercially focused conversations to build meaningful customer relationships, and digital will be important here as part of an omnichannel strategy.”

The key is understanding customers and working with them. “They have lots of frustrating and increasingly complex barriers. I think they want our help in placing our products and deploying them in the most impactful way.” For Styles, pharma needs to carve out a more sophisticated operating model with relevant value messages that address patient and customer barriers at every level. “Then it’s all about dynamic execution, using different channels, all pointed in the same direction, to add informed and tailored value for our customers.”

Morris sees a massive opportunity to move beyond the office/field tension and to translate the rhetoric around ‘it’s more than the pill’ and ‘we are one company’ into something practically meaningful. Customer engagement is central to that, “optimally integrating the customer with high levels of satisfaction, to the brand, to the portfolio or to the wider company.

“You also need to give field teams autonomy and a sense of purpose as part of a coordinated, shared plan.” They will engage more effectively with the customer when they can make real decisions. That places “more emphasis on the engaged customer to say, ‘don’t come to me with ready-made stuff, come to me and harness my enthusiasm, my passion, my network and let’s work together’.”

Enabling a new type of customer relationship will demand investment in people, as Philip Barr, global key account management director at Novartis, recognises. “In my view, companies need to continue investing in developing their people and their teams. Developing and keeping great people within a company helps also building on existing customer relationships. At the same time, there may also be situations where recruiting talent externally is a viable option.”

Morris recognises the potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI). Ultimately, however, he thinks that if we go down the AI road, “we’ll get to a point where we will want and need the human intelligence from a personal connectivity point of view. So, why wait to fall out of love with AI? Put a KAM or a person at the centre and invest in them, join them up. Because that personal contact can build meaningful relationships.”

For Bauldry, there’s real value in letting algorithms crunch the big data, joining the dots between information which may be scattered in silos across the organisation, to generate insights. After all, insights are the foundation of every customer-centric engagement model. The use of AI could then free the organisation’s people to concentrate on creating and sustaining customer partnerships throughout the health ecosystem. “It’s about leveraging the technology, feeding it with data to then inform individual customer insights that lead to clear recommendations on the next best action for an individual customer.”

Like many commonly used phrases, ‘customer engagement’ can easily become background noise. Occasionally it needs to be dusted off and re-examined critically. COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown has given us the opportunity and, to be honest, the necessary kick in the pants, to take a hard look at what we mean by customer engagement, what good could and should look like now, and why do it in the first place.

Engagement, however, is a two-way thing. Maybe we should be asking why our customers want to engage with us. Understanding the world from our customers’ perspective and asking, ‘why would they care?’ at every opportunity is not revolutionary but remains surprisingly rare. So, perhaps the most important lesson we can take from the past 18 months is that customer engagement really starts with the customer.