Empowering customer-facing teams to nurture meaningful HCP engagement

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Before the pandemic, 64% of meetings with pharmaceutical field representatives were held in person. During the pandemic, this shifted to 65 %of meetings becoming virtual, a phenomenon that was consistent across all therapeutic areas. With an increase in the number of face-to-face interactions as the restrictions start to lift, and the preference of some HCP’s towards staying virtual, the way forward looks like a mix of in-person and virtual interactions for the customer-facing pharmaceutical teams.

On top of juggling multiple tasks that include travel, virtual meets and connectivity, administrative work, pre-call planning, prospecting, and relationship building, they also must keep up with the need for On-Demand Customer Engagement.  

This means sharing the right type of content at the right time with their customers becomes a priority. This leads to navigating across multiple platforms and shuffling between different channels that reach the HCPs compliantly. For customer-facing teams staying relevant in the new normal and being productive on all fronts has been a challenge, to say the least.

It is also important to note that as the HCP are adapting to digital tools, they are also faced with cluttered information. An Accenture survey notes that 65% of HCPs agreed that at least one pharmaceutical company has ‘spammed’ them with digital content during COVID-19. And according to a ZS study, physicians only have a 38% recollection of field representative activity. This brings us to the fact that field teams need to be more vigilant about messaging and relevancy. If they are not reaching out to their HCPs with the right message at the right time, someone else is.

The field teams now more than ever need to collaborate, train and adapt to create meaningful HCP engagement to add value to the customers they are serving. That requires a cross-functional effort from Sales Leadership, Commercial Teams, Marketing, Product and Training teams to understand and implement best practices in each engagement scenario.  

As the pharmaceutical industry moves from a push-based engagement to a pull-based engagement for the HCPs. They also need to create a push-based system for the customer-facing teams, which equips them with the right insights and the right content.

The challenge now lies in making the field teams productive, efficient, and impactful by using the push curated insights and making them a pro in no time. Allowing the field representative's time to be more focused on customer engagement and little else is the next logical step.

The three areas Tact Solutions could best support the representatives to maximize the time they spend with HCP are:

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Pre-call Planning

The field reps need to be able to plan each of their visits with the right set of information and insights. This could include their primary research from earlier meetings, notes, insights captured in the CRM systems, responses to previous emails, ideal time based on past behavior, latest trends and new product information, and /or all these above.

To build a long-term relationship with an HCP, the representative needs to personalize each interaction and pre-plan their strategy in advance. So, making sure that they are equipped with insights to better the customer experience and delivering them contextually based on pre-defined triggers such as upcoming meetings and user location, would streamline the process of pre-call planning.

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Integration with personal productivity tools

Like everyone else in 2021, the representatives are also using multiple devices and multiple platforms. The best way to make sure that a rep has access to the right information and right insights across devices and platforms is making sure that your rep’s productivity tools such as calendar, tasks, reminders, address book are integrated and provide them with a role-specific, region-specific unified experience across every device.

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Ease of Collaboration

Collaborating with HCPs remotely comes with its own set of constraints around compliance, channels, and platforms. It is essential that the pharma companies now make it easy for HCPs to engage in remote meetings using their preferred tools like MS Teams for example.

At Tact.ai, we recognized this need and enabled the Tact customer engagement platform to create an intuitive experience for field teams to improve their productivity and sales outcomes.The platform acts as a modern front-end optimized for field teams to reach more customers, personalize each interaction, and capture more insights.

It provides a unified experience across every device which is personalized for distinct roles in the commercial teams. It makes in-the-moment data entry smooth and effortless and provides push curated insights for better call planning. The AI-powered platform also integrates with personal productivity tools such as calendars, tasks, reminders, and address books to drive better and more meaningful interactions with customers.

Enabling field teams with solutions such as the Tact customer engagement platform enables them to create more customer touchpoints per month and reduce the administrative time and effort, which in turn improves employee and customer experience metrics, leading to better customer engagement.  

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Learn more about how the Tact platform enables better HCP engagement: Link: Tact.ai - The Future of Working with Customers

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