Interview with Alyssa Fenoglio, Vice President, Global Head of Digital Commercial at Teva Pharmaceuticals.
Alyssa Fenoglio— who will be speaking at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2024 — says that healthcare lags behind other sectors in providing “delightful” experiences for digitally-savvy consumers. Now, she’s passionate about implementing solutions.
“I'd like to challenge my peers to raise the bar to elevate how we can innovate together to create seamless, delightful, hyper-personalised experiences for our patients, pharmacists, and healthcare providers (HCPs).”
Could you tell us a bit about your role at Teva?
My team is all about empowering our people to create sustainable, long-lasting, trusting customer relationships and businesses for today and tomorrow. What that means is that we’re commercially and digitally equipping people and organisations to attain competitive advantage. We accomplish that through our Global Centers of Excellence, covering topics like customer experience, digital, omnichannel, AI and data science, commercial transformation and capabilities, and our in-house agency.
What are you planning to talk about in your Reuters Event Customer Engagement panel?
I’m thrilled to join this panel, which is all about reimagining next-gen customer engagement. With the rise of consumerism, we need to evaluate how that applies in healthcare. Our patients, pharmacists, and HCPs are all consumers. Their expectations are elevated because they’re engaging with other industries, like Amazon, day-to-day.
Why should their healthcare experience be any less delightful than they would have with a consumer brand? I’d like to challenge my peers to raise the bar to elevate how we can innovate together to create seamless, delightful, hyper-personalised experiences for our patients, pharmacists, and healthcare professionals (HCPs).
What have been your biggest digital marketing lessons learned in 2024, specifically in terms of harnessing innovation and digital adoption?
Companies that use Gen AI tools smartly will accelerate bridging this gap between what patient- consumers and HCPs experience when engaging with brands outside and inside the industry. Specifically, integrating Gen AI tools in our day-to-day activities augment and enhance our strategies, generate key insights, spark creativity, and enable data-driven decisions. Additionally, by delegating manual work to automation tools, capacity is freed up to spend more time on that value-added human work.
The other key learning is the rise of the importance of soft skills like agility and evergreen learning; these are mandatory to survive and thrive in any industry, especially with regards to digital marketing and AI.
Could you give an example of your proudest achievement in terms of creating meaningful customer experiences so far?
I’d like to highlight the remarkable work that our data science and in-house agency teams are doing in partnership. One business problem they addressed was that our pharmacist customers would sometimes miss orders. They’re busy; they forget they’re out of stock. That causes two problems: most importantly, the patient-consumer doesn’t have access to their medication, and secondly, the pharmacist can’t make the sale. To solve that problem, we created an AI-powered personalised marketing campaign with an end-to-end workflow automation that delivered optimal recommendations for the right product at the right time. Our data science team developed the AI methodology and our in-house agency created and executed the customer-facing campaign. This connected experience increased turnover by 0.25 to 1% on average and improved the overall customer experience.
What is the biggest hurdle to overcome in 2024, to get more effective customer engagement?
We need to start building new habits with regards to testing, learning, and iterating with Gen AI tools. To prepare for today and tomorrow, we all have to learn how to integrate Gen AI in our day-to-day – such as becoming skilled at prompting, which I refer to as “the new agency brief.”
Critical elements of a prompt include setting context, direction, and expectations; providing clean data; refining and iterating the outputs; then owning the outcome. This is exactly what we do in an agency brief, and we need to be doing the same with Gen AI tools.
What type of new tactics are you planning to include in your digital engagement?
Our approach is always starting from our customer and business needs. It’s never technology first, it’s always what we’re trying to achieve. We’ll be evaluating which tools are the best ones to accelerate our ambition, which is building digital & AI first— not only— product launches and brand strategies that translate into hyper-personalised, seamless customer experiences. This will be the driving force for how we advance in 2025.