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Why your Consumer Health CRM is falling short
More stakeholders, more channels and higher expectations require consumer health companies to take a smarter approach to customer engagement. Ensuring your CRM enables you to do that is the first crucial step
Sabine Weinhold, Client Business Partner, IQVIA Technologies
Feb 04, 2022

Data is the lifeblood of the consumer health space. The wealth of information and insights that companies can now access to help them make better, faster decisions, and more accurately predict customer needs, is vast, but can be overwhelming.

This data only adds value if it’s easily accessible within a connected commercial technologies ecosystem built for this industry. That is where many current technology solutions fall short.

Many firms rely on point solutions that are cobbled together over time to address specific needs in the consumer health customer engagement workflow. This results in siloed systems that isolate vital business information, making it difficult to make informed decisions and to adapt their sales and marketing strategies to the unique needs of customers.

This siloed environment can impact negatively across many business areas; from not only a loss in revenue, but not capturing the growth opportunities, eroding ROI through to market share and dissatisfied customers - but it doesn’t have to be this way. It is now possible to implement customer engagement ecosystems specifically designed to maximize potential across the customer engagement journey in consumer health market.

In-house solutions are no longer sufficient

Some consumer health companies have attempted to build their own CRM solutions to solve the problem caused by siloed point solutions. However, the need for constant updates and maintenance can quickly make these systems overwhelming for internal IT teams to support.

At IQVIA Consumer Health, we’ve worked with dozens of consumer health companies who have grown frustrated with the limitations of their current systems and aided moves to purpose-built CRM systems that better meet the changing company/customer relationship.

Recently, a mid-sized regional consumer health company - whose internal IT department had been handling the company’s CRM functions on its own for years - realized that it lacked the resources necessary to keep up with increasing demands for system updates, more agile information management tools, and various enhancement requests from different departments such as marketing and sales, so they reached out to IQVIA Technologies for help.

The brief was clear - the company needed a CRM platform that could:

  • Integrate into its broader technology ecosystem in a way that would easily integrate with other solutions.
  • Encompass engagement tools such as remote engagement and closed loop marketing to help commercial teams engage physicians and pharmacists via multiple channels with personalized digital marketing content customized to their specific needs.
  • Help them better understand consumer journeys to create more targeted sales and marketing campaigns.

To address these needs, they deployed two solutions: IQVIA’s OCE Personal, which is an integrated CRM platform that provides role-specific workflows and personalized content based on continuously updated HCP preferences; and OneKey, IQVIA’s healthcare provider reference database, which includes more than 772,000 people in 308,000 institutions at 829,000 workplaces in 116 countries.

IQVIA’s Orchestrated Customer Engagement (OCE) solution was purpose-built to support the entire consumer health sales cycle and to optimize customer engagement at every touchpoint (see image below). Leveraging curated customer data, real-time analytics and intelligent algorithms, OCE provides commercial teams with real time suggestions about individual customer’s preferences and next best actions. These insights ensure they are providing connected and relevant information with every interaction, so they can generate more value for customers and for their own bottom-line.

 

IQVIA OCE Personal & Digital: Cross-functional communication channels integration

This combination of industry-specific technology and data won’t just enable a more efficient sales environment, it will help the company harmonize its commercial outreach activities such as detailing, order management, and store-check across the company’s affiliates and business units in every country.

Beyond the CRM - the future of consumer health omnichannel sales and marketing strategy

Digital transformation throughout the consumer health sales cycle will fundamentally change the relationship between company, customer, and consumer, but the industry still has a lot to do to take full advantage of the technologies on offer.

In a time when commercial teams are becoming increasingly reliant on hybrid, multi-channel marketing strategies, enabling seamless connectivity between marketing and sales teams is the best way to ensure that every outreach will generate an exceptional customer experience.

Pharmacists, other HCPs and retailers expect this level of seamless personalized engagement. The consumer health companies that adapt today have the potential to generate customer loyalty, and deepen trust between themselves, their customers, and the consumers they serve.

To learn more about IQVIA OCE and how it helps consumer health companies orchestrate and optimize an omnichannel sales and marketing strategy, click the CONTACT US button on this page, or to read more about our solutions, visit our Commercialization and Lifecycle Management webpage.

For further insights, please read our whitepaper, Digital Transformation for Consumer Health, which outlines a proven approach to enhancing consumer health customer engagement.

Orchestrated Customer Engagement

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