Customer experience is the culmination of touch points between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship in the environment where customers obtain, use, and receive services. Your experience as a customer at your favorite local shop, for instance, integrates your experience with all of the moments that you’ve had with them – every time you shopped there in person or online, of course, but also every email you received from them, every social media post you saw from them, what happened after you recommended them to your friend, and how it went that time that you had to return something.
Customer experience for a person’s interaction with a pharma brand is just as wide-ranging, if not more. What was the experience of getting diagnosed and learning about your condition like? What’s it like every day when you take your medicine? How well does it work for you? Do you experience any side effects? How expensive is it every time you need a refill? When you need to look something up online, how does that go? When you need to talk to your doctor about your condition, how does that go? What do you see online – on the brand’s properties, on relevant properties, or elsewhere – about your medicine?
Brands that understand that customer experience is an ecosystem will be able to create one that is cohesive, coherent. They will be able to develop and use messages that compliment and build on each other. They will prioritize gathering accurate data and using it to understand what their customers need.
Brands that understand that customer experience is an ecosystem will be able to create one that is cohesive, coherent.
But how do you get to the place where you are doing all that well? It’s a process of maturation. At Intouch, we believe in modern marketing, and we help our clients by investigating and building a plan to increase their levels of readiness – focusing on what makes sense to do in the right order to make the most impact.
Where does your brand fit in terms of modern marketing maturity when developing excellent customer experiences?
- Channel-specific
Your strategies are aligned to specific tactical channels, and they are effectively executed against channel-specific best practices to enable consistent messaging and experience. That’s good … but how can you level up and do more? - Content-focused
Your content strategy is developed prior to your channel mix – so you know what you want to say, before you’re deciding where to say it – but it’s distributed uniformly across the ecosystem as a consistent content experience. It’s good that you have a plan … but you could be giving your customers better experiences! - Preference-driven
You develop segment-specific customer experiences. Your content and KPIs are aligned to your customer barriers, drivers, and preferences. Your measurement is tied to the customer segment. This is all great! What’s next? - Orchestrated
You have a holistic view of your customer across all channels – both NPP and personal – to ensure that each segment of customers receives a unique and maturing experience. You leverage data to drive this orchestration of customized experiences. But what if you treated your customers as more than segments … as individuals? - Predictive
Your orchestrated experiences are combined with deep customer behavioral insights that make it possible to predict and anticipate your customers’ needs, and to foster experiences which are, or are approaching, one-to-one. You’re winning!
Once you know your current level of modern marketing maturity, you can build an actionable plan to move to the next. Customer experiences are how your patients and healthcare professionals know your brand. Once you realize what they could be, you can begin to make them all that they can!
Mike Strassberg is senior vice president of sales and marketing at Intouch B2D.