Embedding Life Science Customer Experience (CX) Successfully

Originally published in 2020 but updated & reshared in 2024.

Organisations that consider themselves ‘very advanced’ at CX are almost 3x more likely than their peers to have significantly exceeded their 2018 business goals. Adobe 2019 Digital Trends Report

Are you considering embedding Customer Experience (CX) into your life science marketing activities?

Customer Experience is the latest reinvention impacting marketing & organisations. In a digital world where customers have a choice and even more control over who they choose to spend their time & money with, providing a seamless, value-added experience is critical. However, when life science organisations are first considering embedding CX into the organisation I often see transformation leads struggling with where & how to get started. Especially when the tools and methodologies of CX are unfamiliar.

What are 3 simple concepts you need to have on your radar at the start of your life science CX journey?

1. Embedding customer experience (CX) impacts the whole organisation

The belief that CX only affects and matters for a single department/section of the organisation must be left at the door. It is important to recognise that a patient or healthcare professional does not interact or engage with your business merely through sales, medical support or patient support services. There are many touchpoints across your organisation – online and offline – that a customer connects with your business.

Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all the interactions a customer has with your business. It’s not enough to measure performance in any one moment. The customer doesn’t care about your individual operations. All they care about is how well they can reach their objective and how they feel along the way (and after).

– Brian Solis –

So even though you may start by embedding customer experience into your marketing & sales activities, ultimately to be fully successful you will need to bring the whole organisation on this journey.

2. It Starts By Walking in Your Customer’s Shoes

A Bain & Company survey revealed that 80% of the companies surveyed believed that the customer experience provided by their organisation was superior, however, only 8% of their customers stated the same.

Don’t fall into the trap of adjusting parts of the business without understanding what matters to your customers.

Understanding where you currently cause friction for your customer is important, but you also need to have a fuller appreciation of what pain points your customer has within their world. By having this empathy, you will be able to provide solutions that add value and provide a positive experience. The sort of experience that engenders brand and company loyalty. We work with life science companies who genuinely want to be customer-centric but are unaware of how internally focused they are, and therefore are not in touch with the needs of healthcare professionals (product-centric, not customer-centric)

Mapping out the different touchpoints where your customer engages with your business and recognising their current pain points is a great place to start. You will need to build your empathy skills, apply human-centred design methodologies (if you aren’t familiar with these tools we can help), and ensure you stop having an inside-in perspective.

Be prepared to have your assumptions challenged – often pain points can be quite simple, and therefore easy and cost-effective to address.

3. Constantly & Consistently Seek Feedback

Embedding & optimising customer experience (CX) requires a shift in the type & frequency of customer feedback that you will need. You need to be constantly & consistently seeking feedback at each stage of the customer journey, and you should adopt a baseline metric that you will use to measure if you are meeting or exceeding your customer’s expectations. Tools such as Net Promotor Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) are a great way to do this but ultimately the most important thing is to understand what you are trying to improve on, that these are touchpoints that customers value, and knowing in real time if you are providing a positive or negative experience.

Embedding customer experience into your organisation will require the adoption of new tools, thinking and culture. And while this will require an organisation-wide shift, the benefits to company performance, and customer relationships will ensure your organisation is Future Ready.

Divergent is a life sciences transformation partner; We are your people capability partner, committed to accelerating your organisation’s CX & omnichannel transformation goals. 

Divergent is on a mission to transform life science commercial teams into the powerhouses we know they can be. Too much potential in commercial teams goes to waste – but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Through our Tomorrows Bridge Builders team program & Today-Tomorrow leaders program, Divergent harnesses a team’s potential to help them accelerate the evolution of customer engagement strategies & be equipped for sustained change.

Interested in connecting & discussing how we help life sciences commercial teams transform & create sustainable change?

Email hello@divergentconsulting.nz

or schedule a time directly into Tania’s calendar.