Challenge

A leading healthcare company had a number of digital initiatives in different markets, like email or eDetailing. However, there was no unfired approach to building targeted and integrated marketing plans across markets and brands.

Each country or brand team developed their own way of working. This meant markets were not aligned on how to work with omnichannel or easily able to share best practices.

While people were keen to collaborate more, digital marketing activities were generally disconnected and consequently the customer experiences were uneven.

As the company had not previously worked in a unified way, Anthill was asked to help implement a common understanding of omnichannel  principles, enable a more streamlined way of working across markets, and provide an actionable plan that could be easily implemented by global and local brand teams.

• Raise internal understanding of omnichannel principles
• Enable a streamlined process of how to work efficiently across markets
• Provide an actionable plan for global and local brand teams

Solution

To provide a common and practical approach for adopting omnichannel at a local level, a common framework was developed.  This would streamline processes throughout the organization and enable everyone to start building communications around the customer – defining objectives, setting KPIs, and identifying the right content and channels for different customer profiles.

Fundamental to an omnichannel approach is a clear customer understanding – who they are, how they interact with the company, and their motivations, needs and concerns.

The first step therefore was to divide customers into those already known to the company and those who were ‘unknown’, having no contact.

Crucially, this provided a clear way to structure the overall omnichannel approach: creating awareness among ‘unknown’ customers and driving engagement with ‘known’ customers.

For example, unknown HCPs who had no contact with the company would be in the awareness phase. The objectives, KPIs, content and channels would therefore be designed to encourage engagement and build a relationship.

At the other end of the scale – in the loyalty phase – where customers are known to the company, the planned engagements would be quite different. This clear approach, while apparently simple, enables highly detailed brand planning and the creation of connected communications and customer journeys.

By building engagements around customer types, it’s now possible to be more relevant to HCPs by matching customer needs with the right channels and content – which was not happening before.

The basic framework was then enriched with actionable tools and templates to provide practical guidance on the creation of omnichannel communications and digital customer journeys – as well as capturing the detail and specificity of each market.

Enabling implementation

Simply providing strategies and tools is not enough. Thinking about the context in which something will be used – what we call ‘the Human Factor’ – is essential. In this case, the approaches and tools needed to be practical and easy to use in everyone’s daily work. People also required help to apply them.

Consequently, to empower local markets and ensure streamlined processes, Anthill developed a series of core workshops, training sessions and materials to generate support for the overall approach and build the confidence to enact the techniques.

These workshops provided detailed, actionable knowledge:

• How to drive customer engagement with data driven decision-making
• How to connect tactics across a timeline and develop connected customer journeys
• How to work with the brand planning templates

Results

The project enabled local markets to better understand omnichannel engagement, provided practical tools and support to achieve it, and encouraged more collaboration – all resulting in an improved customer experience.

The omnichannel strategy, including the framework and templates, were presented to the company’s global digital and engagement team. It was decided to incorporate the whole package into the global planning toolkit.

This means that rather than working with multiple templates and following different processes, all brand teams and other internal stakeholders – medical, commercial and digital – now follow the same process across all brands and countries. This company-wide application of the omnichannel strategy produces more efficient and cost-effective HCP engagements, while improving the overall customer experience.

The planning template is now the foundation for how the client will build out and enable customer analytics and insights, allowing brand teams to better understand customers’ immediate needs and use the analytics gleaned from each engagement for new digital content.

• A unified approach to customer engagement
• Planning made easier and more efficient
• Global and local brand teams empowered to act
• The omnichannel approach now applied locally
• Greater use of digital for improved reach and relevance
• On-going development of customer-centric communications
• Customer experience improved

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