Prolonged debate and high-profile media coverage mean an increased curiosity about the operations and processes of pharma companies.  Interested parties like healthcare professionals and patients now have more questions than ever for drug companies.  They may want to know when patent protection ends on a particular drug before considering placing an order.  They may want to inquire about likely pricing changes, the impact of legislation and the associated timeline.

The level of resource that pharma can push towards resolving inquiries hasn’t necessarily increased in tandem with the growth in demand. So how can drug companies provide answers? Clear and consistent website language is the first step but can only address top-level concerns. Providing efficient self-service options that give answers quickly can help reduce the strain placed by a jump in queries, but where do you start?

Automated customer service will not help pharma companies improve stakeholder relations unless it is speedy, easy-to-use and it helps the business understand what queries are coming in and how the experience is viewed by callers.

To find out more about how automated self-service channels can help pharma companies make inbound calls a positive experience for both parties, please read more here.

This presents a golden opportunity for pharma companies to cast off the shackles of a faceless corporation and develop relationships with the customers who use their products.  It’s a chance to dispel some of the myths and help customers.  Pharma companies are grabbing that chance by offering more channels to contact customers and promoting these channels proactively through their websites and social media.

But there are dangers here.  Pharma can only improve its relationship with patients if the interactions it offers are good experiences.  History is also in some ways a handicap – they have little to no experience in dealing with a high-volume of consumer interactions. As the amount of engaged patients increases, how can pharma companies provide an experience that actually improves their standing with consumers?

The Power of Interactive Voice Response

Intelligent voice solutions can facilitate a dynamic interaction with the caller, empowering customers to resolve inquiries quickly and easily. Cloud-based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions can also be integrated via a secure web connection to any backend system (e.g. CRM, databases, web services) for real-time personalization of the caller experience and data capture of information such as patient history and preferences.

Patients are now seeking out convenient and quick information for new and existing drugs and prescriptions, and they are coming to the horse’s mouth for the answers.  It’s imperative to make sure they can get that information in a convenient, personalized way.

To find out more about how pharmaceutical companies can deliver an experience that works for the patient, read our pharmaceutical industry brief.

Among the many impacts of the Affordable Care Act is the provision that penalizes hospitals for readmitting patients unnecessarily within 30 days of being discharged. Hospitals now face fines in the form of reduced Medicare reimbursements from the Government, and  over 2,000 hospitals were penalized in the first month of the program – some as much as $1 million.

A Plethora of Players and Channels

Hospitals are understandably seeking to reduce readmission rates through preventative care and robust guidance for patients to ensure that they stay on track with the doctor’s instructions, diet, exercise and medication instructions.  For this to be realistic, hospitals need to track and communicate closely with patients, and they need the help of multiple partners: primary care physicians, dieticians, pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies. The dynamics have shifted towards collaborative care, where more parties are paying closer attention to a patient’s well-being.  For drug companies, that means more questions from more interested parties.

Many of these healthcare professionals are under pressure to ensure that patients are using their medication to get the best outcomes (and thus avoid being back in the hospital waiting room). In the background, meanwhile, new channels such as mobile, social and web self-service apps are increasingly being used by both healthcare professionals and consumers to gather information about their regimen and medication.

Answering consumers’ and healthcare professionals’ queries both efficiently and securely becomes a formidable challenge even for pharmaceutical companies with sophisticated contact center operations. The need for cost-effective and efficient service options across multiple channels becomes clear. Whether pharmaceutical companies are currently prepared to answer that challenge might be a little less certain.

Learn more about how our solutions can help pharmaceutical companies overcome the challenges and pressures of changing regulations.

Sorry I stopped contacting you…honestly? It’s not you, it’s me. I need more, I deserve more and I expect smartness and intelligence built into you. I do not call you to give me senseless menu options followed by submenus with long hold music and promotional advertisements and finally, after all the wait and frustration, MAYBE the option to talk to a human being. Excuse me! But I do not have patience to stay on the phone and choose from options one after the other in the hope of reaching a live person, which may or may not happen, based on how you are set up. My life is too busy, I don’t have time to sit and aimlessly answer these questions without getting any value out of it.

I am tired of getting lost in the menu options and complicated path. Most of the time I can’t find the category for the reason I call you and I end up getting transferred multiple times. Sometimes your speech systems are so terrible that they can’t understand what I am saying, hence I yell to talk to a representative and hang up eventually. I expect you to automatically recognize me when I call you back, pull my records, my order history, support tickets, or anything you have so that we don’t end up communicating about that for five minutes before you can help me solve my issue. I know you could do that by smartly integrating with the CRM systems and back end databases, so won’t you please just do it?

I wish our relationship could help in getting callers and customer support representatives to save time by introducing smart self-serve options. This could potentially help in getting more calls answered with a greater efficiency and would also help free up call center agents to deal with more important and critical issues/callers, leading to improvements in response time and customer experience. But, I guess our relationship did not work the way I expected it to.

I do apologize for being rude, but I just can’t handle the fact that you are turning out to be an investment without return. The whole idea of getting us into this was to build a bond, which could help cut costs on the customer support fees by saving time. They say “Time is money” and the time we save by your smartness and intelligence can help the call center agents answer higher priority issues and make them more productive.

I always thought of us as a team, meant to put the customer experience first in everything we do. You’re supposed to offer the best experience that makes me want to call you again and again without hesitation. The key is to keep the caller involved and interested in the call flow, to encourage them to stay on the line by providing them with the information they need and support they expect.

I like you, I see the potential in you and I think you can do wonders if you are designed with a proper Virtual User Interface (VUI) assessment. I suggest you go through the call flow requirements with VUI experts. First step in doing so would involve answering the “why” question. Why would people call you? Next comes the “how” question. How would you handle the “why” in the best and most efficient way? Sticking to the purpose of “Why” will keep your call flow on track. VUI design experts will also suggest you to keep the number of menu levels low. You should only ask enough information to help the caller get proper service, do not interview him with irrelevant questions one after the other. Design the top-level menu option with extreme care, they say “the first impression is the last one” and your success, to a very large extent depends on callers perception of the brand.

Please understand that I care for you deeply. This is why I want you to know that you can also improve yourself by leveraging analytics. Perform regular health checks, to make sure all the caller options are useful and create shortcuts to the call flow to enhance the customer experience. You know what else you could try? You could make yourself more intelligent and powerful by adding speech analytics to your customer experience reporting. Spotting business critical keywords, phrases, pauses in response, etc. can be used very effectively to improve the call flow and drive business to next level.

IVR, please don’t ever think of this as being a “you vs. someone else” situation because it never has been. You were always my first choice, with all the qualities you can bring to the table, smart automation, time saving, successful and easy to use and set up. You have open access to multi-channel; I can send an SMS, e-mail, fax and update every possible record anywhere by just calling you. For years I didn’t think anyone could compete and I still believe in you but in this era of multi-channel, I expect you to be able to send proactive voice and text messages, outbound reminders, e-mail, fax and more.

I know that part of me will always love you and I’ll stand by you in all the improvements you are making to yourself to become what I expect of you: more intelligent and helpful in many ways. Let’s keep this friendship thing going and see what the future holds. I’ll call you, maybe?

For better or for worse,

Priyanka

If there was one word that seems to be increasingly floating around our industry, it’s multichannel.

For many organizations, outbound multichannel campaigns help businesses define, orchestrate and communicate important communication to its customers using multiple channels such as IVR, contact center agents, email, mobile, websites and social media. Unlike other hot buzz words, the increased attention the word multichannel is receiving is absolutely deserved. For example, as we’ve discussed here before, by building a multichannel strategy, especially one focused on proactive, outbound communications, businesses can measurably improve the customer lifecycle as well as increase customer satisfaction.

However, as we’ve seen with previous trends, while businesses and customer experience teams can understand the value a technology or new approach can bring to their organization, designing and deploying an outbound multichannel strategy can be much easier said than done. As we’ve held several conversations recently with our customers and partners on how to build an effective and personalized multichannel strategy, we wanted to point out the four must-ask questions that need to be raised prior to developing any multichannel strategy:

1.       Who is the target demographic?

Understanding not only the type of customer, but also the channels most frequently used by that customer profile can help businesses better focus their resources as well as build compelling proactive content that will resonate with their customers.

2.       What kind of message does your organization want to deliver?

For example, is it a reminder of an upcoming appointment or a response to a customer issue? Determining the nature of the message can quickly inform which channels the business will use in order to maximize reach and outbound message exposure.

3.       What is the urgency of this message?

Similar to identifying the nature of the message content, labeling the priority of the message can help the organization not only most effectively connect with their customers, but choose the best channel and time to do so.

4.       Does this communication need a two-way interaction?

While businesses should always be armed to quickly respond to their customers, some customer communications will inevitably be conversations. For example, leveraging a mobile voice assistant or ensuring the contact center is appropriately staffed will ensure customers receive the personalized attention they deserve.

By taking each of these questions into consideration prior to creating an outbound multichannel strategy, customer experience teams can build the communications that make the most sense for their business goals, customer needs and solution capabilities. From a customer perspective, a personalized multichannel strategy can differentiate a brand from other companies and strengthen the brand loyalty.

We have more ideas on how to create a thorough and tailored multichannel and outbound strategies here, but please let us know of the successful outbound strategies, solutions and tactics your organization has deployed in order to improve your customers’ experience!

We’ve said it before and we will say it again – proactive outbound communication technology not only can help enhance the customer experience, it can also save businesses time and money to improve the bottom line. Cutting costs while keeping customers satisfied is a key concern for many business leaders, especially when communication processes lose out in budget battles. But many industries, including finance, healthcare and travel, are finding ways to leverage customer data and analytics through cost-saving, proactive outbound communication methods that improve the overall experience.

However, businesses that truly want to take advantage of an outbound strategy’s capabilities need to take a closer look at the role outbound communication plays throughout the customer lifecycle. It has been well documented that acquiring a new customer costs more than retaining a current one. By implementing an outbound communication strategy, a company can reduce costs and ensure money is spent in an effective and impactful way.

Below are just a few examples of the role outbound plays in the customer lifecycle:

Customer Acquisition

We know it’s more expensive to get new customers than keep the ones you have, but for many reasons, the majority of customers won’t stay with a brand forever. By using outbound communication tools to offer promotion and discounts, companies can attract new consumers to become loyal customers. For example, a company may send a text message to a consumer who has signed up online requesting more information about flight promotions and offer them a discount to encourage them to become a customer.

Customer Onboarding and Care

Once a consumer becomes a customer, a company can use proactive outbound tools to help set up accounts, provide order status updates and send appointment notifications. These onboarding strategies have a direct impact on customer service for companies in many industries and can effectively demonstrate to a new customer that they’ve made the right choice.

Loyalty Programs

After the first purchase is made, companies can continue to provide a superior experience to existing customers, not only because it’s cheaper and more successful, but to ensure brand loyalty. Similar strategies to find new customers can be used include offering rewards that offer instant gratification to ensure a customer stays with the brand. Virgin Airlines, Amazon and Patagonia are just a few examples of companies that have created loyalty programs that have helped reduce customer losses. Outbound communication is one tool companies can implement to keep customers from going to a competitor.

The end of the cycle

As we said before, customers will eventually leave a brand and reach the end of their relationship. For example, a patient may no longer need to see a physical therapist once an injury has been healed or a customer may cancel a landline telephone plan if they only use their mobile device. Outbound strategies can still be used to ensure the final steps are pleasant – for instance, a phone provider can use an outbound strategy to confirm with a customer that their service has been terminated and that a final bill is on its way. Ending on a high note could potentially help a customer come back.

These are just a few examples of ways that outbound communication can help keep the customer lifecycle smooth and successful. What are some ways your company is keeping customers happy from start to finish?

And if you’re curious, see what outbound communication can do for your company to enhance the customer experience.

Being proactive rather than reactive allows businesses to put the customer first and control a situation, before the situation controls them. As businesses evaluate their customer service strategies, cutting expenses is usually a top priority. The challenge is finding that middle ground where the business can make a manageable investment that also provides a positive, personalized customer service experience.

The most valuable customer service solution that will make any company look like a customer experience genius is: one that leverages customer data proactively and uses analytics to provide a personalized experience.

Taking this approach proves to the customer that the business knows them, understands them and realizes that their time is valuable and they don’t have the time to wait on hold, or repeat the same information over and over again to different company representatives. The investment in proactive, or “outbound” communication technology, is rapidly becoming more popular in many different industries. These industries below have realized how much time and money can actually be saved if they leverage customer data to beat their customers to their concerns:

• Finance – Financial services institutions use proactive outbound communications to offer billing reminders and for debt collections.
• Pharmaceutical/Healthcare – Retail pharmacy and pharmaceutical companies remind patients and consumers to refill prescriptions, inform them of medication recalls and dosing updates, as well as to confirm appointments.
• Travel & Hospitality – Travel companies provide flight information for passengers for flights that are scheduled, as well as travel alerts for when prices have dropped for flights to their favorite locations.

In a recent Forbes article, Emma Byrne says that data scientists are the future of healthcare and that, “better targeting of preventative healthcare messages to the right population at the right time could save $70-100 billion.” That’s a significant chunk of change to save in the long run. As we’ve mentioned, it’s not just the healthcare industry that’s benefiting, here are three ways any business can benefit from outbound communication technology:

1. The Phones Will Be Quieter– Automating outbound communications can decrease the amount of inbound call traffic to a business’s customer service call center. A decrease in calls made to a company lowers overall contact center costs.
2. Updates and Maintenance From Anywhere– Implementing a hosted or SaaS-based cloud service eliminates the cost of on-premise call center technology and maintenance, as the provider can constantly improve the services/offerings and deliver new features from anywhere.
3. Use Customer Data Wisely – Cloud-based solutions allow businesses to create multi-channel customer communication strategies that promote greater engagement. With access from anywhere to caller analytics, purchase history and preferences, businesses are able to proactively leverage the data to provide an intelligent and more personalized experience.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it by using existing customer information to proactively and intelligently reach out to customers about things they care about before they come knocking on your door. Has your company invested in outbound communication technology to communicate with its customer? Why or why not?

If you’re interested in test driving our solutions to see how they can save you money and personalize the customer experience – contact us here.

While an ever-increasing number of organizations are turning to CEM to optimize interactions and ultimately foster greater customer and brand loyalty, here are five things you should avoid when striving to improve your organization’s customer experiences:

1) Don’t get trapped by any single platform or channel. Landline phones, while once the choice of nearly all customers, are now being replaced by email and mobile apps. Recent research has shown that five years ago, 51% of respondents cited a landline phone as the most preferred channel for reaching customer support lines, but today, the number has decreased – 19% will use the phone, but 34% prefer email to connect with support representatives. Offering a multichannel experience will greatly impact how customers interact with an organization and improve the overall experience.

2) Don’t forget to keep website and self-service capabilities up-to-date. Sixty-three percent of customers will go to the organization’s website first to resolve an issue when they encounter a problem. They will use elements such as chat services to interact (18% say this is the first channel of choice), ask questions and resolve issues – that is, if online FAQs and chat services are easy and convenient to use and find on a company’s site.

3) If your customers are mobile, then you must be too. In the next five years, 24% of respondents predict the mobile phone will be the first go-to source for solving customer-related issues. Keeping pace with mobility demands investments in new applications and services that allow customers to interact, make purchases and resolve issues, through secure, handheld and wireless technologies. To note, 41% of respondents to our survey confirmed that they have already downloaded a mobile application to better connect with customer service reps, a sign that investing in improving a mobile experience will be worthwhile for companies looking to enhance the customer experience.

4) It is about the relationship, above all. CEM takes its roots from customer relationship management (CRM), and strives to help organizations use technological advances such as cloud-based services and real-time analytics to streamline, optimize and improve interactions with customers. More and more organizations are realizing the tools and platforms used to optimize customer experiences are best delivered in a service or SaaS (software as a service) model, which enables them to quickly implement and leverage information, to gain better insights and deliver new and better services to customers.

5) It’s impossible to delight if you don’t fully understand how you customer interacts. Greater visibility into customer interactions and anticipating customer needs can bring a company enormous benefits resulting in increased brand loyalty and personalized experiences.  Some benefits include: far greater control over information delivered to customers, transparent visibility into service operations, the ability to measure and improve brand messaging and a better understanding of the full customer experience.

The highly regulated pharma industry makes it challenging for technology and information leaders to launch new solutions that can enhance processes and ultimately improve the bottom line. However, there are ways to follow regulations and keep a consistent, quality experience for everyone involved including employees, pharmacists and patients.

When looking to address transparency issues, companies need to keep a close eye on how certain protocols could negatively affect a customer’s experience. The following steps can help pharmaceuticals minimize the transparency gap between customers using flexible technologies to improve brand loyalty, provide personalized interactions and enhance the overall customer experience.

Know your customer needs before the industry changes

In order to keep customers informed, loyal and satisfied, pharma companies need to be prepared for any sudden changes to industry regulations. This was a challenge for AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, a global biopharmaceutical company, who struggled to keep technology processes up to date with constantly changing regulations.  With cloud-based IVR solutions, pharma businesses like AstraZeneca were able to streamline communication improvements following changing regulations, resulting in an improved customer experience and an increase in brand loyalty.

One holistic view into data results in cost savings

Gaining a holistic view of all the data coming through an IVR can also benefit pharmaceuticals that may have many branches to the business and varying technology processes. AstraZeneca chose to implement Angel’s IVR for its CX Analytics solutions embedded into the solution to monitor where there are inefficiencies in productivity and immediately make data-driven decisions to improve the call process. With insight into how the customer is connecting with the organization, pharma organizations can reduce costs, and constantly make quick changes based on industry and customer needs. With a comprehensive view of the solution’s data, AstraZeneca and other pharmaceuticals can make iterative changes to their IVR to instantly improve a customer’s experience and enhance brand loyalty.

Going mobile to stay connected

Every industry is starting to offer mobile solutions to better connect with patients, and pharmaceuticals should not be left behind. Even with a 46% increase in use of mobile devices for health care information and services since 2010, research shows that pharma companies are lagging in their usage of mobile solutions. Leaders in the industry will always be thinking about the threats to sensitive information about patients or medications, but there are ways around these doubts to cater to customer needs. For example, each pharmaceutical company can create a customized mobile app that can act as a voice agent for customers looking for answers about recent healthcare news or changes to a medication. Providing customers with on-demand access to a pharma company can help increase transparency as well as empower customers and pharmaceutical organizations to develop an interactive, two-way conversation.

We’re confident that our cloud-based customer experience platform combined with Genesys’ technical leadership and global footprint will only provide stellar solutions for businesses to build superior customer experiences.

We were also excited to see the customer experience community positive reaction to the news – a few highlights are included below:

• BMO Capital analyst Karl Keirstead via Eric Savitz, Forbes: “The deal is further evidence of pending change in the contact center software market, which is transitioning to cloud-hosted solutions (Angel.com has a cloud-based and mid-market solution) at an accelerating clip.”
• Dan Miller, Opus Research: “Buying Angel could also put Genesys squarely in the speech-enabled Personal Virtual Assistant business. Angel’s Lexee was developed to showcase the ability for speech-application developers to make customer care much more conversational. It leverages Angel’s experience in building dialog models in specific industry domains and some advanced work in applying real-time analytics and natural language understanding.”
• Richard Snow, Ventana Research: “The core product of Angel.com is its customer experience management platform, which primarily supports inbound and outbound IVR services. These will be added to the Genesys platform so between them they support more channels for customer engagement. It has also built various applications around these services to support business processes such as name and address capture and payment processing.”

As mentioned in the commentary above, our goal for this partnership is clear: continue to design technology that not only helps businesses create a personalized customer experience, but also offers platform flexibility and the ability to develop natural connections with their customers.  Recent research points out that almost two-thirds of organizations are adopting cloud-based contact centers to improve customer interactions. We’ve addressed this trend in recent materials and found the key business drivers to cloud-based contact centers revolve around being able to do more with less, improving the customer retention and meeting the needs of customer 2.0, or the customer that is connecting to businesses via Web, mobile and social media channels

As customers increasingly connect with businesses through various channels, having a solid cloud-based customer experience platform in place can be the critical foundation of a multichannel customer experience strategy. The combination of our technology with Genesys aims to help organizations continue to develop their existing customer relationships, leverage new channels and ultimately, improve brand loyalty.

There will be so much more to come from our new partnership, but of course, please let us know if you have any thoughts or questions.