The Missing Middle of Omnichannel
Customer Measurement

THOUGHT STARTER SERIES

Measuring the impact of customer engagement has long been a struggle for life sciences companies due to the difficulty of linking customer-level engagement data with sales impact. Even in the U.S. where healthcare professional (HCP)-level prescribing data is available, understanding true cause and effect can prove challenging.

Without a more granular understanding of how customer engagement drives value, most companies are left flying blind, delivering engagement plans and tactics without any way of knowing if they are having the desired impact.

At Veeva, we believe there are five key measures that can help commercial teams fill the gap of omnichannel customer measurement. But before we dive into what we call the “missing middle,” let’s first take a look at the five core dimensions of measuring omnichannel customer engagement (see diagram on page 2):

1. Exposure – Measures which customers you are engaging with and how—through what channels, at what time and with what content.
2. Engagement – Assesses whether your customer interactions drive positive engagement.

The first two levels are input measures—they are designed to show what engagement activity is taking place. They are valuable things to measure but in themselves don’t tell you much about impact. To do this you need to add outcome measures (levels 3-5).

3. Conversion – Adds further context around whether positive engagement resulted in a desired action by the customer. This can be tactical (e.g. getting them to attend a congress), or ideally, more strategic (e.g. moving them through a ladder of adoption until they are advocates of your product).
4. Experience – Brings the voice of the customer into play. It is critical to capture feedback directly from customers about their experience of engaging your company and what they think about your products.
5. Results – Measures business results, typically based on sales or market share. But ultimately, impact should be measured by the number of patients benefiting from your products.

The dichotomy of current omnichannel measurement

Historically, pharma has been very good at measuring levels one (channel-level exposure measures) and five (aggregated business results at market, submarket, or hospital level) because this data is most readily available. Most teams have access to detailed reports and dashboards that slice and dice this data in many ways.

The challenge with focusing on these two levels is that it is either too high level (results), or too granular and siloed (exposure) to drive meaningful action and help refine and optimize engagement strategies. To help identify this missing middle of omnichannel customer measurement, we’ve developed the following key measures that can fundamentally improve your level of understanding and effectiveness (see diagram).

Filling the missing middle

Customer engagement index (CEI)

The customer engagement index is the first step in moving away from measuring interactions at the individual channel level to having an objective measure of engagement across all channels and touchpoints over time. The CEI is calculated by analyzing every type of interaction with a customer—both customer-initiated (pull) and company-driven (push)—over a given time period and applying a score or weighting to each interaction based on the relative quality of those interactions. These are then added up and indexed to arrive at one score per customer. The beauty of this measure is it encourages a truly omnichannel approach and can be used to correlate to other measure such as whether better engagement led to better satisfaction, conversion, and business results.

Share of voice and benchmarks

Veeva Pulse is a unique, proprietary aggregated data set built from millions of HCP interactions across the world. Through this data, companies can understand actual share of voice—how much interaction they’re having relative to others. The difference with this data, compared to just looking at your own data or using survey data, is how comprehensive it is and the fact it is built from actual HCP behavior and engagement.

Relationship quality

This measure seeks to evaluate the quality of the relationships between your customers and field teams. Using a similar approach to the customer engagement index, it looks at all interactions between reps or MSLs and their customers, and intelligently scores “real engagement” by analyzing the volume, quality, and timeline of activity. Every individual relationship is scored to better understand connections and help identify which relationships need to be prioritized and how.

Journey conversion

Many companies have invested huge amounts of time and money designing target HCP journeys and planning campaigns to execute on these journeys. However, they are often executed with limited visibility over whether the desired customer action was achieved. Measuring journey conversion assesses how well HCPs progress through an adoption ladder with a clear data-driven view on the target behaviors and next actions you are trying to drive. Visualizing and measuring journeys in this way provides rich insight into what type of engagement works with different types of customers.

Customer satisfaction

Finally, capturing the voice of the customer is essential for truly understanding the impact of your engagement. The typical measures are Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and/or Net Promoter Score (NPS). There are many ways of measuring this. The challenge is to try and move away from one off, ad-hoc primary research to capturing ongoing, regular feedback. It is also important to measure customer sentiment and perception as well, particularly when it concerns a specific product.

Technology platforms such as Veeva CRM offer powerful ways to capture the voice of the customer on a regular basis. Take, for example, the five-star rating that pops up at the end of a Veeva CRM Engage Meeting call to ask the HCP to rate the call. It takes less than 10 seconds to complete but can capture useful information about whether a customer found the interaction valuable. The survey facility within Veeva’s eDetailing aid (Veeva CLM) is also a powerful tool to capture HCP reactions and sentiment. All help to build up a far richer picture over time about what customers really think.

Capturing the right data to drive insightful action

The reason these five key metrics have not been more widely adopted is due to the complexity in capturing the necessary data to measure them. This should no longer be the blocker. Veeva offers a range of tools that customers can use to not only help capture the right data points, but more importantly, enable this insight to be fed back to the right people in the right way so timely action can be taken to improve the customer experience (see diagram).

A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work when it comes to measuring omnichnannel engagement. The key is to be clear on the business question you are trying to answer and the decision you are trying to make, and then selecting the right range of tools to enable this. Getting this right will help unlock further efficiency and effectiveness in your omnichannel strategy.

Key Takeaways

Opportunities exist to address the “missing middle” by better linking channel-level customer engagement measures (exposure) with high-level results by measuring engagement, conversion, and customer experience.

Introducing five key metrics, each of which brings a unique and different perspective to omnichannel measurement, can transform your understanding of the effectiveness of your customer engagement and omnichannel strategies.

The ability to capture the right data should no longer be a blocker if you are clear on the questions you need to ask and the business decisions you need to make.

Veeva’s technology suite offers the ability to not only capture the right data at scale, but present this data back in the form of actionable insights to allow commercial, medical, and field teams to make more effective and timely decisions.

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Aaron Bean
VP, Business Consulting – Europe
Aaron.Bean@veeva.com

About Veeva Business Consulting

Veeva Business Consulting combines commercial and medical expertise with Veeva’s proprietary data and technology to deliver better business-focused solutions for our customers. Our team of experts offers a suite of advisory offerings, including launch readiness, digital acceleration, and content optimization, all supported through unique HCP insights and analytics.

To learn more, visit: veeva.com/business-consulting.