6 Tips for Customer Engagement Optimization

India represents the 5th largest pharmaceutical market in the world with a $41 billion size and growing at a rate of 16%. It is currently experiencing unforeseen business challenges by way of increased competition, changing consumer behavior, rising employee costs, and new disruptive, agile players entering the market.

With changing customer behavior and digital disruption across sectors, can pharma brands continue to market products with the same go-to-market models as before?

There comes a time in every industry when waves of change sweep away every construct, process, and system, and in a span of a few years of this change, the industry, its models, customer interactions, metrics, and service models are changed forever.

Banks and financial institutions experienced such a renaissance in the last decade. An industry that relied on one-to-one interactions, personal meetings, introductions, and social bonding, successfully transitioned to digital-first approaches. Many banks have carefully retained elements of traditional interactions for specific scenarios. While high-engagement products such as wealth management, portfolio management, and premium accounts continue with face-to-face interactions, retail accounts, transfers, deposits, and withdrawals have gone predominantly digital.

Redefining pharma customer engagement strategies in a digital era

Today, the pharmaceutical industry stands at a similar turning point. Leading companies are embracing novel digital technologies, AI-powered customer engagement tools, and advanced analytics to redefine their customer engagement strategy.

Commercial leadership continues to value the Medical Sales Rep channel while recognizing the need for new tools, models, and channels to engage physicians effectively. AI-powered customer engagement solutions are enabling pharmaceutical companies to deliver more targeted and relevant content to healthcare professionals. The push is towards more personalized, data-driven, and agile approaches to engage physicians and other stakeholders. Change is accelerating, and first movers will gain significant competitive advantage.

Several progressive Indian pharma organizations experimented with different marketing models by different brands through digital-only and hybrid promotions. While measuring the complete effectiveness of digital-only models requires comprehensive customer engagement analytics, it's now established that digital-only go-to-market and hybrid (integrated digital and face-to-face) approaches represent the future of pharmaceutical commercialization.

So, how do you decide when to continue with in-person engagement and when to adopt digital-only or hybrid approaches? As pharma companies optimize sales resources, they must ensure they retain the benefits of a personal share of voice while enhancing scale through digital.

Six actionable customer engagement optimization tips for pharma leaders

1. Select the right brand or portfolio

Use digital promotions strategically for the right brands, while reserving face-to-face marketing for high-value products. Consider factors like product life cycle, competition intensity, market growth, brand equity, and differentiators. A strong pharma customer engagement plan balances portfolio funneling with targeted outreach.

2. Use agile methods to manage content

Content remains the linchpin of digital engagement. Agile content management allows teams to be lean and responsive. A recent Indegene report on the digital affinity of HCPs highlight that content relevance and personalization are now top drivers of HCP satisfaction, outweighing frequency of contact. AI-powered customer engagement platforms can hyper-personalize physician content delivery across channels, ensuring 360-degree engagement. This is the essence of customer engagement optimization – delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

3. Microsegment your customers

Traditionally pharma companies have pursued a one-size-fits-all approach. This is especially true when it comes to brand positioning, go-to-market strategy, or resource allocation. The mantra in today's digital age is "personalize or perish." Acknowledging your customer as more than another member of your database can go a long way. Knowing your customer's digital behavior can help identify the right channel mix to deliver content when and where they are most likely to consume. Taking the time to segment and map the customer journeys across channels will greatly improve your digital engagement. Research suggests that nearly 63% of HCPs are now "triple-screen" users.

4. Prioritize your channels

Base your channel prioritization on behavioral research. Build a mix of channels ranging from high-reach to high-engagement, and design cross-channel journeys. Modern AI for customer engagement tools can predict which channels will have the highest impact for specific segments, boosting both efficiency and conversion rates.

5. Focus on the right metrics for customer engagement data

It is quite often tempting to start with easy-to-capture metrics. These metrics do not initiate or trigger actions. Marketing teams can get swayed by reach and impression numbers and all decision-making or success definition can be done around these numbers. The danger in such situations is that quite often we miss the 360-degree engagement metrics including CSAT, NPS, or consistency of engagement at the customer level. In lieu of finding a single metric that captures everything, figure out the metrics that matter in each situation.

6. Complement in-house capabilities with agile partners

Building internal digital capabilities is important – but capacity, scale, and agility are key to execution. There are several moving pieces in building cross-channel journeys and driving exceptional customer experience. Keep your internal resources' focus on defining a clear strategic direction and ensuring span leadership sponsorship.

Conclusion

The pace of change will only accelerate. Advances in AI, predictive analytics, and omnichannel orchestration are creating unprecedented opportunities to personalize at scale. By combining these technologies with a clear customer engagement strategy, pharma companies can achieve sustainable competitive advantage and deliver future-ready healthcare.

Those who act now — with agility, data intelligence, and customer focus — will set the standard for the next era of pharma customer engagement.