Elements for omnichannel maturity
Unlocking your brand's potential to build customer trust
Brand teams in life sciences companies are typically adept at developing go-to-market strategies, communication playbooks, campaigns, and other initiatives that bring the brand promise to life for various audiences with the support of their functional counterparts. However, targeting diverse customer groups with distinct brand journeys and delivering the right message at the right time across multiple channels is a challenge for these teams.
Life science companies are increasingly investing in omnichannel capabilities to enhance their digital maturity and keep up with the growing demand for customer-centricity. When considering the scale, rigor, and standardization of the medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) review process at most organizations, it is well-known as a mature, high-functioning capability, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards, generating fair and balanced brand messages and content, regardless of who delivers or receives the message. By replicating this proven model when implementing omnichannel customer strategies, brand managers and their functional counterparts can bring cohesive, relevant, and compliant messages to a large scale. This enables them to orchestrate a seamless and consistent experience for each audience and automate necessary internal processes to achieve the desired audience interaction.
By connecting their go-to-market strategies with omnichannel capabilities, life sciences companies can bridge the gap between their brand promise and deliver a more engaging and personalized customer experience across channels and audiences.
To deliver on their brand promises effectively at scale, life sciences organizations must adopt an enterprise mindset when building, delivering, adopting, and utilizing omnichannel capabilities. Rather than treating omnichannel as an afterthought, companies should integrate it proactively into their enterprise needs. This shift is crucial as the omnichannel capability stacks at many organizations often involve redundant efforts across data, technologies, and processes used in different collection systems, point solutions, or enterprise systems.
While departments like medical affairs and sales and marketing prioritize regulatory compliance and privacy, organizations must also establish building blocks that promote omnichannel maturity across teams and provide enterprise scale. Commercial, medical affairs, data insights, IT, and other leaders should think strategically and tactically to create scalable capabilities that can be shared across the organization to unlock the brand's potential.
By adopting an enterprise mindset, organizations can streamline their omnichannel capabilities and avoid siloed efforts that hinder customer-centricity. For instance, integrating customer data from different departments into a single platform to gain a comprehensive view of the customer journey would enable the delivery of more personalized, consistent, and high-quality customer experiences across all channels and audiences, resulting in better engagement.
Implementing an effective omnichannel strategy can establish trust between life sciences brands, HCPs, patients, and other customer groups. By providing consistent messages and high-quality interactions that align with the brand’s promise, life sciences companies can build affinity and loyalty among their audiences.
To achieve this, life sciences organizations must prioritize a human-centered approach, putting the needs of their varied audiences first. They must also adopt the omnichannel strategy and its principles across the organization and appropriately equip internal teams with the tools, technologies, and processes required to fulfill both the strategy and the ethos of their brand promise.
Ready to optimize your customer engagement and build seamless experiences? Reach out to Slalom to partner together on bringing your brand promises to life with the underlying data, systems, processes, and people enablers of an omnichannel strategy. We look forward to hearing from you!
