Video
Pharmaceutical leaders are boosting productivity by taking a more customer-centered approach. Nitin Chaturvedi, a partner with Bain's Healthcare practice, discusses four steps pharma companies can take to successfully manage customer episodes.
Read the Bain Brief: The Cure for Pharma's Commercial Productivity Woes
Read the transcript below.
NITIN CHATURVEDI: Pharmaceutical companies are pursuing various avenues to enhance productivity. One such approach that has shown promise for the early adopters is to focus on the customer experience rather than pushing the product. Bain research shows that physicians who give high marks for customer experience are 2.3 to 2.7 times more likely to prescribe the drug. 40% of the overall prescription decision is based on customer experience. This number rises to 60% when we look at the factors that are in the control of the commercial organization. So this has promise.
But we also know that most physicians are dissatisfied. One practical approach that pharma companies can adopt to enhance experience is through customer episodes: rethinking them, redesigning them and managing them. By customer episode, we mean the end-to-end set of activities that a physician needs to engage in to perform a task. For example, staying on top of the latest scientific information or selecting the right patients for the right treatment options.
There are four steps to doing this well. First is through deep customer insights, understanding which customer episodes matter to the physician, and of those, which ones can deliver the highest business results for the pharmaceutical company. Second is redesigning these episodes to evoke delight and remove hassles. Third is choosing the right multichannel mix to deliver that. And fourth, closing the loop by tracking the improvement in customer experience through the Net Promoter Score.
By adopting this approach, pharma companies can enhance loyalty and advocacy and open a new avenue for productive growth.
The Cure for Pharma's Commercial Productivity Woes
To earn greater loyalty and raise productivity, figure out what really matters for doctors.