2020 Virtual advisory board
How to accelerate remote HCP engagement – based on COVID-19 learnings
Agnitio recently facilitated a virtual advisory board meeting on how to accelerate remote HCP engagement – based on COVID-19 learnings.
The board comprised commercial, marketing and IT leaders from 10 European-based life science companies including ALK, Bayer, Bial, Essilor, Recordati, and Roche.
Read the 7 essential take-aways below or download them as a PDF document.
1. Customer-centricity
Avoid screen fatigue – and cut through the noise
Customers are being bombarded with invitations to engage online. To get through, relevance has never been more important. One way to achieve this is to consider how engagement can shift from one-way to co-creation of solutions and support that’ll make a real impact on HCPs – and their patients.
2. Rep support
Look at how your digital investments help reps
Reps are often included too late in projects. Make sure to include the actual users early. You need to clarify how new digital tools and processes benefit them, how they make their lives easier, and their customers happier. If you involve reps to help create your solution, motivation increases – as does your chance for adoption.
3. Digital technology
Start simple then scale
To avoid the potential of increased complexity due to technology, practice the ‘art of the possible’. A concrete example: to meet HCPs’ growing ‘screen fatigue’ engage them via email right now. If opt-in is in place, building a repository of approved emails that reps can use to personalize their digital engagements with HCPs can be a good start.
This enables you to provide relevant content while tracking how HCPs engage to see what they’re most interested in. If you don’t have opt-in yet, a remote opt-in campaign is probably your first project.
4. Organizational
Find your "intrapreneurs"
The COVID crisis has accelerated the adoption of digital technology in our ways of working. What previously took months, we’ve been able to adopt in a few days or weeks. Even though the general digital savviness has increased dramatically, it’s still key to benefit from your digital frontrunners.
With digital it’s becoming easier to build best-practices as it’s so much easier to measure and share. Structuring knowledge sharing around your internal advocates is a good way to keep the pace in your digital adoption.
5. Culture
Encourage experimentation
With customer demands and market changes happening ever faster, there’s a growing need to embrace digital.
Increased competition and disrupting technologies from out-of-industry players puts additional pressure on us to adapt.
This requires transforming our culture and becoming more agile – providing people with a freedom to experiment. To get there, we should encourage a ‘trial & error’ culture where mistakes become an integral part of how we work. Learning from both successes and mistakes is key in a fast-paced environment.
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6. Content & Compliance
Challenge the grey zones
We’re often using the restrictive nature of our industry as an argument for our relatively slow adoption of digital technologies. But perhaps the COVID situation made us realize that we can do more.
To make it happen, we might need to give Compliance more ownership and much earlier involvement in digital projects. They are not there to say ‘no’ but rather ‘how’.
At the same time, we should also have the courage to push the boundaries and challenge current practices. This includes pushing back on Compliance when there are good reasons for it.
7. Data management
Keep connecting
COVID-19 stimulated an immediate uptake of remote engagement technologies, helping solve a short term challenge.
However the speed of action meant that some tools were implemented without a holistic view of overall customer experience.
Now is the time to connect newly introduced standalone activities and provide customers with a connected experience that they expect.
To enable this, it’s essential to get the data strategy right. What is it that we’re trying to achieve? How do we best execute? And how will the data help measure progress?
Rethinking remote engagement in your company?
We’re here to help if you’re interested in exploring how you could benefit from accelerating your remote engagement strategies – or if you’d like a demo or simply get a free trial of a remote detailing solution.
