All together now: The case for a unified engagement goal in pharma marketing

The pharmaceutical marketing landscape has evolved significantly in recent years, largely due to increased access restrictions and a growing preference for digital channels among healthcare professionals (HCPs).

Pharma companies integrated digital channels and adopted omnichannel strategies to complement face-to-face interactions. But this shift created a new challenge: a disconnected and interruption-heavy customer experience for HCPs as various commercial functions—such as brand marketing, marketing operations, field teams and sales ops—operated independently, each with its own goal and priority. Additionally, noncommercial functions, such as medical affairs, influence the customer experience in different ways.

As a result, responsibility for customer ownership becomes ambiguous, leading to a situation where everyone and no one truly “owns” the customer. And omnichannel customer experience, even for digitally mature organizations, falls short of delivering its full impact.

Now, we have new technologies and the opportunity to realize the vision of true omnichannel. This means it’s imperative for pharma organizations to centralize customer insights and knowledge, set individual, context-driven customer strategies and planning across all products and teams and deploy the appropriate roles and channels to execute these strategies in real time, in an n=1 way. These actions blend the digital and human touch to deliver growth and impact in the go-to-market arena.

A cross-functional, balanced scorecard approach is essential for planning and improving the overall customer experience. But pharmaceutical organizations can take the first pivotal step by managing commercial engagements with customers in a unified manner. To achieve this, they should adopt a unified customer engagement goal across all commercial channels.

In simple terms, a customer engagement goal is a metric that represents a measure of the total engagement from all commercial interactions with a customer across various channels and touch points within a defined timeframe. This goal allows for the expansion of execution strategies beyond mere field call planning to include a full spectrum of omnichannel touch points. In the end, when we achieve the customer engagement goal, we influence a customer behavior change.

The absence of a unified customer engagement goal not only hinders effective customer engagement, but it also complicates performance measurement and strategic decision-making.

Without a unified goal, there’s no common unit of measurement. Instead, various tactics are evaluated using distinct metrics. For instance, headquarters marketing may prioritize digital engagement metrics—such as open and click rates—while the sales team may focus on face-to-face reach and frequency. With such diverse metrics, companies must track a wide range of performance indicators to assess the overall customer experience. This takes a lot of time and the complexity can lead to inconsistent analyses. It’s often unclear which metrics should be prioritized, resulting in trial-and-error approaches across channels, ultimately undermining engagement efforts.

A unified customer engagement goal provides a foundational blueprint that aligns all planning—both tactical and strategic—across marketing and sales channels. Instead of maximizing individual channel metrics, companies can focus on the same outcome: improving the customer experience.

• Assign a unified customer engagement goal across channels: For each planning period, every customer (at n=1 level) is assigned a single engagement goal that encompasses all push and pull interactions throughout their engagement. This goal should consider various factors such as the brand’s overall objectives, marketing investment levels, customer journey stage and customer engagement preferences.
• Set intuitive and familiar goals: Customer engagement goals should be expressed in a shared language both field teams and marketers understand. This clarity fosters departmental alignment and enables sales and digital teams to effectively complement each other’s efforts in achieving customer engagement goals, ensuring a consistent experience throughout the customer journey.
• Balance the quality and quantity of interactions: Once the customer engagement goal is assigned for a specific planning period, it should be easily decomposed across tactics. Data-driven insights should be leveraged to develop a comprehensive understanding of each customer’s needs, preferences and behaviors. This knowledge informs the optimization of the customer engagement goal, ensuring the right mix of tactics that balances the quantity and quality of interactions. Such an approach ensures that engagements build upon one another while minimizing redundant messaging.
• Track and analyze progress in real time: Customer engagement goals can serve as a leading indicator for engagement effectiveness and should enable organizations to track progress in real time and assess how much of the goal has been achieved to date. This allows for timely analysis of any engagement gaps and helps inform necessary adjustments to the promotion mix to meet the desired engagement goal.

Additionally, these goals also facilitate regular assessment of how engagement efforts are affecting brand sales—such as return on investment calculation—providing the opportunity for adjustments to maximize sales performance.

ZS employs a proprietary methodology called the Customer Engagement Index^TM (CEI) to help pharma companies establish customer engagement goals. The CEI methodology quantifies historical customer engagement by evaluating three key dimensions—breadth, depth and consistency—synthesizing them into a single score that offers a comprehensive view of engagement. The CEI framework is adaptable, so it can cater to the specific needs of different therapy areas and market dynamics, optimizing engagement strategies for varied commercial contexts.

What sets the CEI apart is its dual role as both a measurement tool and a strategic enabler. Beyond offering insights into engagement levels, it empowers organizations to align future engagement goals with brand strategic imperatives. For instance, it helps define specific engagement goals for each customer to measure their progression up the adoption ladder within a designated timeframe. The CEI methodology has been established across a number of pharma companies, therapy areas and markets across several countries as a leading indicator of sales growth. Its biggest impact has been its ability to measure and guide even when HCP-level prescriber data is not available, a reality in many markets especially outside of the U.S.

ZS is transforming omnichannel tracking and optimization with OMEGA^TM, its AI-powered capability with CEI at its core. OMEGA enables seamless assignment, real-time tracking and actionable insights while leveraging classical and generative AI for granular, n=1 analysis. It identifies low engagement areas and provides customized recommendations to enhance HCP interactions. Pharma companies can dynamically refine engagement plans, balancing quality and quantity for impactful customer experiences.

Organizations should start by unifying their customer engagement goal using a structured framework like the CEI. Tracking the CEI regularly will help them continuously monitor progress and optimize performance. By aligning the entire organization around a single engagement goal, companies can ensure that every interaction, whether digital or face-to-face, is strategically coordinated to influence customer behavior and drive sales growth. It’s an important step on the journey to modernize the go-to-market approach for the AI era.