During the recent Pharma2022, a Reuters event, SciencePOD CEO and founder Sabine Louët chatted to Lance Hill, CEO at Within3. Within3 is an analytics company gathering insights helping pharma companies enhance their customer engagement. In this interview, Hill gives us insights into the role of content in stimulating customer engagement from Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) as a means to gathering insights on their perspective.
Engaging with customers the right way
“We help organisations identify who they should be engaging with and why and what context,” Hill explains. Furthermore, he adds: “we then have a whole suite of technology to help them engage more richly and more conveniently and more efficiently”. As a result, it helps companies to “understand the outputs of all of those engagements, harmonise them together to allow companies to make decisions faster.”
During this process, Hill highlights the importance of communicating and engaging with customers in a way they can comprehend. If you don’t do this, “what you’re going to be doing is making a strategy based on a lot of flawed assumptions,” he explains. In addition, it is a missed opportunity to understand how they think and what their perceptions are. “Good customer engagement allows you to identify that gap and then have a variety of ways and mechanisms of reaching those audiences,” he adds.
Success story
The impact of this approach can best be illustrated by one of their typical success stories. During COVID, for example, when everything was unpredictable, and everyone felt uneasy, he recalls seeing companies he worked with chatting about how COVID will affect their patient therapies. “I remember seeing communications with patients talking about their challenging time, accessing therapies, alternative ways they could get their therapies back to them,” he says. As a result, he says, these companies began “changing how they were thinking about getting their therapies in the hands of those who needed them.”
Interacting with Health Care Professionals
Companies typically interact with healthcare professionals in many ways from traditional face-to-face meetings to multiple types of virtual engagements. However, “[HCPs] are very busy and the time demand for them is very, very high.” Therefore, “if you can open up more flexible ways of interacting with them, that’s a huge advantage” Hill explains. His perspective reinforces the need to be aware HCPs require flexible ways of communicating to accommodate their busy schedules.
Omnichannel communication
One of the most common approaches offering flexible communications has recently involved targeting customers via omnichannel communication. However, the limitation of such an approach is that they are mostly one way, relying on push communication methods. Instead, Hill advocates for the need to have a two-way communication to stimulate better engagement and answers to key questions such as: How do I learn what the marketplace is telling me? How do I create an environment where I can get feedback directly so I can use it for my strategy?
“No matter what your intentions are with HCPs, if it is sharing data or asking for feedback, it all starts with creating content for them to react to.”
Lance Hill, CEO Within3
Content to stimulate HCP interaction
Lance also highlights the need for stimulating content to successfully engage with healthcare professionals. “No matter what your intentions are with HCPs, if it is sharing data or asking for feedback, it all starts with creating content for them to react to,” he says, adding: “Whether you’re working on new messaging and you’re trying to get an early reaction to that messaging, all of that requires content for them to react to,” he says.