In this edition, we’re shining our spotlight on the pharma customer experience. We discuss what customer experience really means in pharma, how it’s developing, who your audience is and why measuring emotion is vital. Read online or download your free copy now! Then be sure to get in touch with us with any feedback or insights you have too – we’d love to continue the discussion…

1. 1Customer Experience |www.wearecouch.com
SPOTLIGHT ON...
THE PHARMA
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Inspiring audiences. Motivating change. Thinking beyond.
ISSUE 1

2. This eZine explores the concept of customer experience from a variety of angles, such as
the role it plays in adherence, patient centricity and, from a local perspective, the NHS.
We also try and define what customer experience in our industry means.
I as always would love to hear your thoughts on this eZine and if this something you
would like to see more of? You can email me at ash@wearecouch.com or tweet me at
@ash_rishi.
Till next time.
Ash Rishi
Managing Director
COUCH Medical Communications
Welcome to the first in our spotlight eZine. We will be
launching these periodically and the first spotlight is on
pharma and the customer experience.
If pharma can boldly move on from the past and embrace
a new way of thinking – slowly weaving a commitment to
customer experience throughout the organisation – they can
make huge advances. For as long as good customer service
exists alongside a product that works, customers will keep
on coming back, and pharma will reap the rewards.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

3. Defining the pharma customer experience
Shifting from product to patient centricity
Adherence: The patient is no longer a passive player
Who in the NHS needs to hear your brand value proposition?
Why measuring emotion is vital for the pharma customer experience
IN THIS ISSUE

4. 4 | Customer Experience
v
With the explosion in connectivity, from smartphones and tablets to laptops and desktops,
pharma is finding it easier to keep in touch with their customers, this is creating a step-change
in interactions, with online content and social media discussions supporting and sometimes
even replacing traditional advertising and sales. Companies can also begin to understand
much more about what their customers want and need. This two-way interaction improves
transparency, which in turn can help to build trust and boost customer loyalty. However, this
has not been a straightforward task so far, for a number of reasons, such as:
DEFINING THE PHARMA
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
We’re not clear who our customer is.
What we do has worked in the past – why shouldn’t it work in the future?
We already know exactly what our customers need – safe and effective drugs and devices.
Strict regulations make it impossible for us to change how we communicate with our
customers and their patients.
4 | Customer Experience

5. 5Customer Experience |www.wearecouch.com
Good CX depends on answering a number of vital
questions:
Function: does the product do what the
customer, healthcare professional, and the
patient needs it to do?
Accessibility: how easy is it for customers
and patients to access the product?
Usability: how easy is it for the patient to
understand and use the product or
comply with the drug regime?
In order to create and maintain a good CX, the
pharma company must answer all these questions
and interact with the customers and end-users
in a way that meets, or preferably exceeds, their
expectations. If the customer has a product that
works, and is easy to get hold of and use, this will
increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, improve
patient outcomes by improving access to drugs, and
ultimately boost revenue.
For industries like biotech and pharma, changing this
mind-set is vital, as the only way they can compete
in the crowded and cash-strapped marketplace is by
developing a value-driven CX strategy.
Customer experience (CX) is the sum of every
experience and interaction a customer has with a
provider over the lifetime of the relationship. The
pharma perspective on CX is more complex than
many other industries, as it involves a number of
different customers, and needs to bear in mind the
patient perspective as well. The patient journey
is highly personal, with interactions with many
professionals at different stages and locations,
including primary, secondary and tertiary care.
Understanding this journey is an important part of
building customer experience for the payers and
budget holders who buy the products and services
on behalf of the patient.
WHAT IS CUSTOMER
EXPERIENCE?
Costs are key drivers for pharma’s customers. As
funding gets more and more squeezed because
of changes in global economics and patient and
disease demographics, customers such as budget
holders and commissioners are under increasing
pressure to demonstrate the value of the products
they buy.
Patients are more informed than ever about their
condition, and can access disease and treatment
information (reliable or not) at the click of a button.
Therefore, they want more than just product
information; they want support in managing their
disease.
To achieve these aims, the companies need to build
better connections with customers and demonstrate
exactly how their products provide value and meet
customer needs.
KEY CUSTOMER
CONSIDERATIONS

6. 6 | Customer Experience
To shift from a product-specific to a patient-centric model is
proving to be trickier for pharma, bound by regulatory and legal
hurdles, getting this right is difficult. However, pharma, you can
start by understanding what makes your audience “tick.”
Sounds like a tall order? Not really. To create a model that
appeals, you need to tap into neuroscience, which is simply
understanding people.
Neuroscience is the understanding of the way our minds work,
particularly with regard to making links and connections. The
brain is like a series of highways that are all interconnected,
and during the process of thinking we make up to 100 million
new connections every second! Through this, we associate some
pieces of information with other pieces to create understanding.
To make neuroscience work for you and help you create a patient-
centric model that focuses on drawing stakeholders to your
products and services, you need to drive associations and the
connections that facilitate them. Some of the ways you can create
the associations you want are:
SHIFTING FROM PRODUCT TO
PATIENT CENTRICITY
6 | Customer Experience

7. 7Customer Experience |www.wearecouch.com
Make it easy
Focus on making it as easy as possible for them to
communicate and engage with you by setting up
processes in a way that feels familiar. This makes
it possible for them to do things using an existing
“mind map” or understanding, without having to
learn something completely new. In addition, we
want minimal change because it’s hard work to
create new mind maps.
Empower
Patients need to reach realisation on their own,so
you need to empower them to do so. Those “Aha!”
moments when they believe they have understood
something well enough to make a choice are the
best selling tool you’ll ever have. To encourage
them to happen, you need to highlight emotional
connections by using terminology such as
highlighting benefits, not features. That empowers
us to make the connection between your products
and services and the problems or issues for which
they need solutions.
Connect socially
With social media now at the heart of (almost) every
digital interaction, there’s no longer a free pass.
Start sharing tips to manage conditions, make your
social media presence useful. Try and move away
from disease awareness, I can think of a number
of prominent pharma companies on social media
who are in fact scaring patients, patients want to be
motivated not scared.
To make the shift to patient-centricity you need to
prepare for the future, which requires you to use
neuroscience. And who knows, it might be easier to
implement than you think!
1
2
3

8. 8 | Customer Experience
The realisation that good customer experience (CX) is important for the
success of a business is certainly old news, even in the pharma industry.
With the proliferation of CX related articles, conferences etc., we assert
that pharma still have a few challenges to overcome to implement customer
experience strategies, and remain out of sync with stakeholder sentiment.
Pharma struggles to accept that the power is now in the hands of payers,
healthcare professionals or the patient.
Ultimately though, the next generation will reshape pharma as they have
already transformed other industry sectors. Pharma must focus on improving
their customer experience strategies if they don’t want to be left behind.
ADHERENCE: THE PATIENT IS NO
LONGER A PASSIVE PLAYER
8 | Customer Experience

9. 9Customer Experience |www.wearecouch.com
Patients want to be involved in their own healthcare,
they increasingly access clinical and prescribing
information online, no longer a passive player when
it comes to their own health and digest as much
information as they want, at their own leisure.
Patients each with unique priorities, expectations and
demands, will have a large appetite for personalised
information and real-time feedback. As patients,
payers and healthcare professionals demand
more, pharma are at a crossroad to live up to those
expectations, piling on more pressure to demonstrate
product value and improved patient outcomes.
Today, successful companies base their consumer
and business decisions on a real- time understanding
of how their customer feels. Too often pharma
neglects to fully understand or implement a CX
based on the needs of the customer but it would be
advantageous for pharma to begin investing in its
customer experience strategies.
This is always easier said than done. Successful
strategies will always focus resources where they will
have the most impact and too often pharma fail to
focus efforts in any meaningful way. The challenge
begins by defining who the customer actually is and
pharma should start by being clear about this.
THE PATIENT IS NO
LONGER A PASSIVE
PLAYER
CUSTOMER SENTIMENT
Research and measure again and again and again...
If you’ve put into place a great added value strategy,
what’s the point if you’re not going to bother adapting
and improving it based on the feedback you get?
How can you expect to offer a compelling experience
if you do not know what they expect from you
during each stage in the treatment journey? Many
successful companies say measurement is the ‘voice’
of the customer and research is the only way you
can understand customer needs as they evolve and
change.
Even more vital is that research is continuous and
outcomes are readily available to staff delivering your
customer experience otherwise the data is worthless.
Tracking also ensures you know where you stand
relative to competitors over time.
Begin by measuring:
How your customer rates their experience?
How the CX affected outcomes?
This allows pharma to focus on measuring what
matters. In a world where your competitors can reach
a global audience in seconds, ensuring that they are
happy is clearly good for business and should remain
a constant top priority. It isn’t an unattainable goal for
every pharma company to utilise good engagement
tools to increase the positive impact they can have
on patient lives, by remaining adherent, and the
healthcare industry more widely. And ultimately, if
you are not making this effort, it is without doubt that
your competitors are.
BUT HOW ARE WE MEANT TO
KNOW HOW A CUSTOMER
FEELS?

10. 10| Customer Experience
WHO IN THE NHS NEEDS TO
HEAR YOUR BRAND VALUE
PROPOSITION?
You would be hard pushed not to notice that things are changing. Gone are
the days when using a sales team to demonstrate the safety and efficacy
of your drug or device would have been enough. Your product is now in a
market full of ‘me toos’ and substantially cheaper generic drugs. Payers have
the upper hand and in most cases, smaller budgets. What are you doing to
stay current, demonstrating the value that only your product gives?
Brand strategies are about more than just increasing sales. Drugs and
devices are developed to improve outcomes, and this needs to be reflected
in the brand, alongside the cost-effectiveness for the payers – the customers
– who are looking to cut costs, including possible adoption of cheaper
product options such as generics. To survive in this increasingly competitive
market space, the brand needs to work effectively to establish market share
and brand equity, protecting products against generics by building loyalty
and trust prior to patent expiry.
Communicating the ‘brand value proposition’ is an important part of
engaging stakeholders in any marketing activity. However, with global brand
teams building a global value proposition, they cannot neglect the need to
remain locally relevant to succeed.
10 | Customer Experience

11. 11Customer Experience |www.wearecouch.com
Changes to the NHS over the last ten years
has seen a marked increase in its number of
stakeholders, including decision makers, influencers
and payers, all with an increasingly diverse set of
roles and responsibilities. The decision-making
process has undergone significant change, moving
from being largely clinically-led to substantially
payer-led.
These changes have left us with a
multi-organisational and multi-stakeholder approach
to decision-making. In an NHS customer structure
that includes, frontline GPs, clinical commissioning
groups (CCGs), regional teams and national teams,
getting a decision can be complicated and daunting
especially for those companies used to working with
physicians based on long-standing relationships.
This complex web of non-clinical payers makes it
harder for pharma to determine the best approach to
influence customers, requiring specific approaches
according to their differing roles.
The national and local health economic situation
will also affect how each payer makes decisions.
However, job titles can only represent a vague
guide of the specific nature of a payer’s role.
Even within the same organisation, there may
be one commissioner with a pharmacy or clinical
background, and another whose background calls to
financial decision-making.
WHO IS THE CUSTOMER?
Keeping up with these changes in the NHS will
allow you to implement marketing strategies that
will future-proof your brands. Therefore, it is more
important than ever for you to truly understand your
customer and give them the best experience
possible. GPs are now responsible for more local
commissioning, managing the total budget for
healthcare provision to their patients, and having the
right to veto service changes. At the next level up,
commissioning support units (CSUs) support the
CCGs and focus on helping the commissioners to
improve patient care.
This switch from top-down control to local decision-
making allows a broader value- based approach, with
a commitment to money-saving, reducing wastage
and increasing efficiency. A spectrum of initiatives
have emerged from this financial approach,
including a longer-term focus on disease prevention
through healthier lifestyles. However, by focusing
on engagement and aligning with the needs of the
customer, companies can work with payers to help to
save money elsewhere in the system.
Working with stakeholders in your NHS
communications when creating your value
proposition during your brand planning is
increasingly useful when planning for the future,
taking into account customer needs with the aim
of driving brand uptake. Recognising the different
payer audiences is vital to building the customer
experience strategy, as well as understanding the
patient journey and developing materials and content
that can provide patient support and position brands
alongside the patient journey.
HOW IS THE NHS CHANGING?

12. 12| Customer Experience
WHY MEASURING EMOTION
IS VITAL FOR THE PHARMA
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
When writing about the pharma customer experience, we have often spoken
of the benefits insight-driven research has, we often say it’s the best and
only way to understand the needs of the customer, and find out what they
expect from your brand. However, once you have understood the needs of
your target audience, what comes next?
In an industry where it is becoming harder to be heard, combined with the
naturally (and perhaps increasingly) short attention span of many human
beings, storytelling can offer a different approach to delivering relevant,
meaningful and memorable information and create long lasting connections
with stakeholders. Stories are also more likely to create a two-way exchange
of information, as they will fit in with a stakeholder’s emotional experience.
Stories after all are about people, their problems and the solutions, and
therefore can work at a number of levels, especially for the healthcare
professional looking to solve a problem, and the patient who may have
difficulty understanding or acting on health information.
12 | Customer Experience

13. 13Customer Experience |www.wearecouch.com
A little side bar to this blog post. Emotion has never
been defined, the word itself derives from the Latin
‘emovere’, which is to excite, agitate or create a
shift in feelings. In 1981, Kleinginna and Klenginna
created the closest to an accepted definition, they
defined emotion as a complex set of interactions
which can:
causepleasure/displeasure
create cognitive processes, such as
labelling or appraisals
activate physiological adjustments to
pleasurable conditions
lead to behaviour that is often expressive,
goal directed and adaptive.
The last point can be instrumental in eliciting a
change in behaviour, such as prescribing patterns or
health choices.
References
Cooper, P. and J. Pawle, Measuring Emotion
in Brand Connections, in Innovate ES-OMAR
Conference. 2005: Paris.
DEFINING EMOTION
To build trust in a pharmaceutical brand there needs
to be familiarity, function and also an emotional
connection. That emotional connection to a product
and the relational strengths of companies and
representatives can be almost as important as the
product’s functional characteristics in driving trust
and, ultimately, preference and prescribing behaviour.
THE ROLE OF EMOTION
Storytelling is an important tool for building trust
and engagement with patients and healthcare
professionals, including doctors, nurses and other
caregivers. There needs to be an emotional bond
created by a story. This is because emotion is an
important storytelling tool – the contribution of
emotional factors in making a decision about a
brand is as much as 85%, and pays a greater role
than functional factors1. While this is based on a
study about cars, cereals and magazines, the levels
of emotional connectivity are likely to be as great
for healthcare products, and perhaps even greater,
considering the role they play in our families’ lives.
STORIES AND EMOTION
The ability of brands to measure real, unarticulated
and constantly expanding emotional customer
expectations is where an advantage is won.
Successful brands need to use authentic storytelling
and position themselves meaningfully to appeal
to emotional values of customers. They need
to recognise that the experience and emotional
investment of a customer is key. According to
experts, in fact, emotions influence behaviour far
more than quantifiable metrics.

14. 14| Customer Experience

15. 15Customer Experience |www.wearecouch.com

16. At COUCH, we create content that responds to the known
needs and preferences of your target audience, and elicits
the desired response from them.
www.wearecouch.com
© COUCH 2016.l if i