The 4 C’s of Omnichannel – the keys to success or a 60s band name?

As an industry, those of us working in Pharma have finally had our hand forced to think more about digital. Listening and understanding our customers’ preferences and the constriction of HCP (healthcare professionals) access accelerated by the pandemic compelled the life sciences industry to find better ways to engage customers.

For me, the joy of this challenge is the innovation that came out of it. It created an opportunity for us to truly think differently about how, where, and when to engage in customer dialogue to be useful.

As part of this innovation, I have seen a clear uptick in thinking around the 4C’s of Omnichannel, namely Customer, Context, Content & Collaboration.

The limitations of Multichannel engagement

Over the past decade, there has been a clear increase in digital engagement between HCPs (healthcare professionals) and their patients. While multichannel engagement models are already in place, they also highlight the gaps in the current customer engagement journey.

In an uncoordinated multichannel setup, we risk overwhelming customers across multiple channels, resulting in more noise than meaningful connections. Without a unified experience and a shared narrative, there is more confusion than clarity. Internally, on the Pharma side, the insights across marketing, field teams, and other engagement channels are not fully embracing the customers’ journey, but instead creating multiple silos. These silos also indicate the gaps between strategy, vision, and end-user execution.

The opportunity of Omnichannel engagement

In stark contrast, the omnichannel engagement model is far more personalized, progressive, and sophisticated and requires stronger collaboration and partnerships across the various customer-facing teams. It aims for better customer engagement through personalized and strategic customer journeys.  

In an omnichannel engagement model, a unified experience is created for customers across all channels. Optimizing content based on the context of the channels, devices, timeliness, and customer preferences makes the entire effort more cohesive and optimized.

Human –Friendly and Data-Driven

At the receiving end of each communication, campaign, customer journey, and engagement plan- we have a person. And when we focus on the person and make the process human-friendly, it is no surprise that we get better results.

When we know the patterns of interaction that deepen engagement with healthcare providers & stakeholders, we can replicate them. Essentially, we want to figure out what works and do more of that. Capturing more digital & field team data and analyzing it intelligently, rather than working from anecdotal examples, is how we make that kind of continuous improvement systematic.

The human-friendly element is not just for customers but also essential for the orchestrators of exceptional customer experiences (the customer-facing teams). The tools and quality of insights at their hands determine the success of the overall programs. To have the best chance of success it is critical to determine how to best empower the customer-facing teams to orchestrate your omnichannel touchpoints. For they are the humans that interact with other humans in the best possible way.

This is accomplished by using tools to map your customer's journey, interests, behavior, and previous interaction data to create a seamless 360-degree customer view. This data makes it easier to pinpoint the ideal Next Best Action/ Engagement/ Content/ Service for conversion for your customer-facing teams.

Tact’s omnichannel customer engagement platform

The Tact AI-powered customer engagement platform empowers life sciences, teams, to work with their customers in newer ways to drive better outcomes in every interaction across the customer journey. It boosts field productivity by enabling field teams to be nimbler and more effective.  

It is specifically designed to create an omnichannel, holistic, and outcome-centric customer engagement experience. It encompasses the hybrid customer engagement journey by combining and aligning the face-to-face, phone, email, video, chat, and self-service modes of engagement. It can bring visibility to the marketing touchpoints too, whilst simultaneously providing feedback to brand teams on the effectiveness of those. The Tact customer engagement platform helps life sciences companies deliver personalization at scale while diversifying their technology stack with best-in-class tools.  

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