Customer Centric Service: The New Rx for Physician-Rep Relationships Integrating Sales, Marketing and Promotion to Deliver The Right Customer Experience

By John Moran, IMS Health

As the industry moves from its traditional sales and marketing approach to customer centric service models, companies are seeking to better meet physicians’ need for product, disease state, and reimbursement information. A recent IMS study indicates that physicians want fewer, but stronger, relationships with company representatives who can provide more valuable information, deliver more relevant services, and better respond to specific needs of the practice. Innovative companies have developed a value-based approach to engaging physicians, using new personnel structures, communications, training, and performance metrics. This article addresses key strategies and tactics for becoming more customer-centric, particularly how companies can use an integrated sales and marketing approach to optimize the customer experience.

Different physician types demand different experience models
Not every physician has the same idea about what is the ideal way to interact with a company.  Many factors influence the physician's view of the ideal experience.  Personal preferences, communication styles, level of disease understanding, practice setting, local formulary control, disease specialty, and patient demographics, among others, shape the physician's preferences for interaction.  Identifying and delivering the right customer experience has become one of the key priorities for companies implementing new commercial models.  The challenge for marketers and sales organizations is to recognize and address physicians' differing views about what makes up "the right experience".  For example, some physicians may want to receive product information via peers, but want company points of contact to deliver essential services, such as patient education materials, samples, and insurance reimbursement facts.  Others may desire to speak with a highly skilled product specialist, who can provide guidance about the particular patient types that generate the strongest outcomes for the product.

Leading companies for the customer centric model have learned to characterize and treat prescribers according to their preferred interaction or experience styles.  To deliver the optimal experience, commercial organizations have learned to truly know customers at a much more granular level than traditional analytic approaches permit.  For example, customer segmentation must go further than distinguishing physicians on the basis of total prescription volume.  Responsiveness to different forms of promotion - whether personal, non-personal, or peer-to-peer - is an equally important variable to assess.  Attitudes and preferences for receiving information, as well as the make-up of the physician's patient base, must also be considered to effectively profile and predict what the optimal interaction looks like.  Using these types of insight, industry sales and marketing organizations can design the right customer experience, determine which physicians respond to this experience type, and better deploy their field forces and other resource investments.

Another important consideration in designing and executing the ideal customer experience is the set of characteristics and attributes possessed by representatives who physicians most value.  In IMS Health's work in comparing field force effectiveness across companies, IMS has found that different physician types - and therefore different "experience segments" - value different attributes and behaviors.  By aligning representatives with the right attributes and behaviors to the right physician experience segments, companies can improve the overall relationship, which IMS has identified as a key factor in driving product utilization.  Customer value metrics can then be used to track performance in the key attributes and behaviors that physicians value, and an ROI model can be constructed.

Lastly, local market influences should play a major role in designing the optimal customer experience.  IMS Health's study of interactions at the district level shows that a company's sales force can have widely different levels of success in building relationships and achieving product utilization.  Managed care, patient demographics, level of consumer directed promotion, and economic factors will cause a particular customer experience model to be more or less successful.

New forms of promotion needed for customer centric operating model
Commercial innovators are using customer research and analytics to measure the impact of different promotion channels, specifically how promotion supports or takes away from the ideal customer experience model.  For example, e-detailing supports a customer interaction model that is scientifically focused, less person dependent, and more "on-demand" based.  Innovators are studying promotion impact at a more granular level, such as at the customer segment level, the geography level, and the formulary status level, to assess impact on the customer experience.  Promotion ROI is no longer the only concern.  Understanding how promotion contributes to building the relationship and overall experience is growing in importance.  Developing estimates of the carry-over effect of experience-building promotions is not easy, but as marketers get to know their customer types better, this type of strategic metric will become increasingly important to promotion mix selection.

Regionalization initiatives around the industry will lead marketers and sales executives to undertake these types of evaluations to more effectively plan and drive promotion strategy and local market sales force deployment.

The need to base promotion on the desires and interests of particular customer groups, as well as their responsiveness to different forms of promotion, will be a key factor and result in differentiated marketing strategies driving more relevant information to customers.  Companies undertaking this approach are already reaping benefits in terms of stronger customer relationships.  Equally beneficial, promotion differentiation will also help drive higher sales force productivity and improvements in ROI.  Ultimately, commercial executives will model promotion spend by customer segment, rather than simply at a channel or brand level, and develop more optimal segment level mixes, which will result in higher productivity.

The industry has embraced new forms of promotion, such as social networking, peer-to-peer communications, and web-based education, but challenges remain for evaluating impact and ROI.  Today's promotional mix is much more complex.   But armed with new forms of promotion, the marketing strategist can now more effectively align promotion choices with customer preferences.  With overall responsiveness to physician visits declining, commercial leaders must embrace multi-channel strategies as a tool to boost ROI and drive stronger customer experiences.

Responsiveness to new forms of promotion, such as digital media, can be effectively measured with a combination of cause-and-effect analysis.  Here well designed, in-market tests are structured and customer research is implemented to explains why physicians did or did not respond to certain forms of promotion.

As companies seek to design and implement an array of optimal customer experiences, brand teams will match the optimal promotion mix to the desired customer experience model, taking advantage of the wider choice of promotion channels.  The future will require a more integrated view of companies' sales and marketing investments to clearly identify how spending decisions can be improved, whether it's to drive higher revenue, reduce inefficiencies, or both.  Companies will take advantage of new analytics that incorporate anonymized patient level data and enhanced promotion data to optimize brand and portfolio spending.  By combining traditional promotional response analysis with strategic insights and benchmarks, companies will be better able to determine how customers respond to new promotion forms, as well as market test some of these new promotion channels.

Integrated customer view essential to greater sales and marketing effectiveness
Aligning sales and marketing organizations around the right set of customer experience models is essential to the success of any new commercial model initiative.  This involves recognizing how physicians will respond to each type of model, determining the ones that offer the highest potential in deepening customer relationships, predicting which physicians prefer these experiences, and developing a set of capabilities to enable differential execution of customer experiences, whether through personal or non-personal promotion channels.  The last requirement may be the most challenging for companies that have traditionally deployed a single experience model, engineered primarily on personal selling.  Companies that have successfully moved from a single experience model to a more diverse set of experiences have typically overcome three obstacles:

1. The needs and preferences of key customers have been identified based on a segmentation approach that is supported by both sales and marketing;
2. A clear mapping / identification system has been developed that allows the commercial organization to place physicians into distinct customer experience segments;
3. Wider, cross-functional involvement has been achieved in designing the set of experiences, in particular, tapping marketing analytics and managed care marketing to include the role of formulary status in physician preferences for interactions and in deploying field reps.

Innovators have expanded upon the traditional process of formulating promotions, using historical detailing response curves to include strategic assessments and benchmarks of non-traditional forms of promotion.  They are building and executing experiences that have much more value for their customers, and are more cost efficient, since the highest cost component, PDEs, are optimally allocated.  This contributes to stronger relationships.

Through the alignment of customer promotions with the needs and responsiveness of customer segments, field force productivity is significantly increased.  In many cases, dollars directed to the field force can be redirected to other promotional channels, offering stronger marginal rates of return and improved ROI.  Changing the traditional promotion allocation process to a customer-response based process is the critical first step.  Helping marketing and sales understand promotional decision-making and how to improve it is critical.  At IMS, we recommend doing side-by-side comparisons between the outputs of the traditional promotion allocation process and the more advanced integrated channels approach.  The incremental value identified is often significant to drive support to make change happen.  

What should companies do to implement the right customer experience?
One element of formulating the right experience is to establish the right mix of promotion channels - personal, peer-to-peer, social networking, samples, electronic education, and disease area sponsorships.  In today's challenging operating environment, brand teams must make every promotion dollar work effectively.  New tools for establishing the optimal mix, from both ROI and customer experience standpoints, are required.  One such tool is an integrated approach to promotion optimization, which is described in Figure 1.  This approach combines traditional, historical, promotion response analysis for continuous promotion forms, such as detailing, samples, and meetings, with response metrics for non- continuous promotion forms, such as periodic digital events, phase IV trials, sponsorships, and other channels that afford historical activity data or are not conducted on a regular basis.

Figure 1. Integrated Approach to Promotion Optimization

*The "Customer Segment" can be defined in any number of ways, such as based on decile, geography, demographics, common attitudes, common dynamic market behavior, etc.

This integrated approach determines quantitatively the expected ROI at a customer segment level and brand level, helping brand teams make resource allocation decisions more effectively.  The advantage of an integrated optimization is greater efficiency.  Since detailing and samples work synergistically, or counteractively, with other forms of promotion, commercial leaders can now truly optimize across channels, not just for a few. 

Another important area for implementing the right customer experience is to establish new analytics and communications processes across sales and marketing.  An integrated optimization approach, such as the one described above, will only succeed if the commercial organization understands it, embraces the new analytics required, and supports the outputs.  This is often a difficult step, since sales operations may have a very different view from marketing on which physicians should be the focus of personal selling efforts.  By bringing in a broader understanding of the impact of all channels on physicians, mutually derived customer segments can be established.  Helping sales and marketing understand the full impact of promotions across the spectrum of promotion forms is essential.  This means the analytics process should have regular review points in which learning is shared across the commercial organization.  Achieving buy-in to the promotion strategy is even more critical in executing new commercial models and driving toward the ideal customer experience.

Finally, trying new customer experience models is essential for success.  Many companies have pilot programs in place to evaluate their enhanced go-to-market strategies, focusing almost exclusively on prescription volume lift and cost efficiencies.  However, the opportunity also exists to learn how model change impacts the customer experience.  Pilots should include a learning objective related to improving the experience across distinct physician segments.  From the physician's point of view, commercial model change is only successful it can improve relationships and drive market share gains, or achieve cost efficiencies.  The goal of commercial leadership should be to ensure new initiatives are truly living up to the aspiration of becoming customer centric and delivering the highest quality experience to each customer group.