Covid-19 vs Customer Experience: Does your CX cut it in the “New Normal”?

The emotional element of professional relationships has definitely been put under the microscope this year. Whilst many have enjoyed the flexibility of working from home and the reduction in travel, the removal of face to face lunches and coffee meetings until potentially 2021 means that things that were the building blocks of developing relationships with both customers and colleagues have stopped and are in some cases very hard to replicate virtually.

How important is the emotional element of professional & commercial relationships? For many organizations it is the key tenet of their branding and customer experience strategy. Gone are the days of product-based messaging. Take Coca-Cola for instance which has moved away from marketing on the quality of the product (‘Delicious & Refreshing’ or ‘You Can’t Beat the Real Thing’) to its latest slogan focused on the experience it creates: ‘Open Happiness’ ^{Source 1}. The same can be seen in the pharma industry where purpose statements are focused on people more than products – with emotive phrases that go beyond the treatment of diseases to longer-term partnerships based on making life better and creating a healthier world for all people. So, with this emotive messaging, you have promised your customers a partner who will support them to improve their life, with the implied notion that you will be there ‘for better or worse’. In 2020 many have experienced ‘the worse’ especially within Healthcare, at sharp end in the fight against Covid-19. Either as medical staff who are treating patients in conditions that have been compared to ‘war zones’, or as patients who have been impacted by the deferral of diagnosises / treatments and social distancing requirements. Non-Healthcare industries have rallied to support Healthcare professionals and those affected, through providing free food and drink ^{Source 2} to mortgage and loan holidays, access to long-term savings accounts, and extended overdraft facilities for those who need to self-isolate or are too ill to work ^{Source 3}. However, beyond the standard call of duty; have pharmaceutical organizations lived up to their promise to improve life during Covid-19? We have certainly seen a large amount of funds being donated across the industry to support both healthcare professionals and patients ^{Source 4} as well as practical changes to customer interactions such as:

• Employees with medical training being able to volunteer to support their community hospital, relief organization or local testing site while maintaining their pay and benefits ^{Source 5}.
• Implementing virtual training that pairs specially trained nurses with patients to teach proper self-administration of certain medicines from the safety of the patient’s own home ^{Source 6}.

Have these initiatives been recognized by your customers? Do health care professional perceive the pharma organizations they interact with as understanding the challenges they and their patients are facing and more importantly do they see them doing something to help overcome them? As DT launches its 2020 HCP Customer Experience Survey, we will be asking these questions, to find out who is excelling when it comes to CX in the ‘new normal’. As those organizations who are living up to their promise to ‘improve life’, who are providing practical support in these challenging times will find themselves with customers who will stay with them for a long time for better and worse.