Interview with Panos Papakonstantinou, Global Engagement Catalyst Leader at Roche
Panos Papakonstantinou, the Global Engagement Catalyst Leader at Roche, will speak at November’s NEXT Pharma CX & Engagement Summit 2023 in Vienna, Austria, in a session entitled ‘Unlocking the power of CX for authentic and meaningful engagements.’
SciencePOD had the opportunity to speak with Panos ahead of his session about the challenges in engaging healthcare professionals (HCPs) through multiple channels and embracing a customer-led engagement model.
Could you tell us about your role as Global Engagement Catalyst Leader
I’m working with top regions and affiliates across the world, understanding their level of digital maturity and in particular customer experience, what challenges and opportunities exist in achieving their business impact, and helping them achieve their objectives.
My role is truly taking an enterprise mindset across the portfolio of capabilities and services existing, to help Roche achieve our personalised customer engagement ambitions.
Can you give an example of what type of new technologies you typically work with, with your affiliates?
Defining how solutions connect to each other, how they address customer needs and how they impact customer experience is at the heart of our work. In many cases technology isn’t the limiting factor, rather it’s the attitude towards change and learning how to deal with this new technology.
Specifically, we are rolling out a centralised CRM solution across the world to be able to organise the data that we have from interacting externally with our HCPs: the way that they want to interact with us, the way that we orchestrate that interaction through our portals, apps, and insights that are generated, and the way that we can become better in terms of listening first and serving the right content to our customers.
What type of attitudes are you encountering with this new technology?
Working in a modernised digital way, and placing HCPs at the centre, we have to think ‘what is it that they want to hear from us?’ We need to instil that ‘serve-first’ mindset, rather than a push mindset. And a lot of that has to do with us having the right talent and being able to understand what we should do differently. How should we change the way we interact? And how do we listen first, and then serve based on the needs we’re getting? It’s about adopting the right mindset and orchestrating that gracefully to be able to make change happen.
Through your work, what do you think is the most important shift you’ve been able to create?
HCPs in their daily lives are used to working with other industries, where their own needs, preferences, and desires come first; for example if we think about the customer experience in the entertainment and FMCG industries. HCPs then move into the pharma world where today their experience is different. We’ve been trying to get our message out there first – about new advancements, molecules that are coming up, and so forth. And as interesting and innovative as these might be, perhaps our HCPs want to start the discussion from somewhere else. There’s a disconnect with what they prefer.
It’s all about trying to meet healthcare professionals where they already are, in terms of engagement. It’s very clear that an ‘omnichannel’ engagement isn’t a separate strategy in itself; it’s an enabler to help achieve our overall Roche strategy.
Are there any particular channels you believe are useful for this?
I think the real key is being able to manage all channels, orchestrating them in a fine-tuned way so that we can bring all these aspects together, while meeting our HCPs where they are. Face-to-face isn’t contradicting or conflicting with the omnichannel world, it’s very much integrating and enriching the omnichannel world to make sure that we prioritise a customer driven experience.
What’s the vision for the future?
In essence, what we’ve been doing so far as an industry has been mostly one way communication. But nowadays it should be a bi-directional way of connecting and doing so in a meaningful way – listening first and picking up on the right things. We need to evolve from a Product focus to a Customer focus mindset, especially with our customer expectations driving the need for change, to help us in Roche to achieve our vision for the future of driving 3-5 times patient benefit with half the cost to society.