May 23, 2022
The State Of Customer Experience In The Pharmaceutical Industry, 2022: Patient Interactions
Executive Summary
Pharma Channels Perform Poorly for Patients
As patients seek to become more informed about and involved in their own healthcare, their health outcomes are closely related to the pharmaceutical industry’s success at engaging with them. To assess the current state of this relationship, we collaborated with Carenity, part of EvidentIQ, to survey patients across Europe and the US. We put patients in the role of the customer and applied our Customer Experience Quotient® (CXQ®) metric to see which CX efforts pleased or disappointed patients (see Figure 1). CXQ® assesses whether the expectations that patients have regarding pharma-created services and information match what they actually receive in terms of an information or service being trusted, accurate, personal, simple, and up to date (see Figure 2).[i] This year, we found that:
- Patients want to be up to date. Patients’ primary activities involve accessing news and information about their condition or treatment (see Figure 3). They want to learn more about their health issues but don’t focus on wraparound support services that don’t contribute to this. Few respondents use medication reminders, patient support programs, or general health management resources. No type of content provided a good or excellent customer experience (see Figure 4). Patients judged most content types as just fair, although the poor ranking for symptom information and patient forums is a concern.
- Patients rated telephone the highest… In this year’s CXQ® study, just one of the various channels that pharma uses to engage with patients managed better than a “fair” ranking (see Figure 5). Telephone help lines, which are often the first contact method that patients see on a pharma firm’s website, led the way. With an average CXQ® score of just 28 across all channels—slightly down from last year’s score of 30—it’s clear that pharma can do much more to meet patients’ needs and expectations (see Figure 6).
- …but get most pharma-created content via email. Nearly four in ten respondents indicated that their most recent engagement with a pharma company took place via email—far ahead of company websites, mobile apps, and sponsored forums (see Figure 7). However, patients’ favorite channels through which to interact with firms were company websites, social media, or sponsored forums, as they increasingly seek information on their own terms to suit their digital lives.
- Patients actually prefer different channels depending on which service they need. Patients are clear about which channels they do—and don’t—want to use, and the misalignment between what they want and what they get compounds already poor CXQ® rankings for channels. We also found an imbalance in the amount of information provided via some channels, particularly company websites, although it also suggests that firms don’t place enough emphasis on social media and traditional print media.
[i] We surveyed 763 patients and found that the primary expectations of patients are personal treatment, trustworthiness, accuracy, simplicity, and timeliness. See The State of Customer Experience in Pharma: Patient Interactions 2020 report.
Figure 1: The Customer Experience Quotient® (CXQ®) Survey, Patient Interactions
Figure 2: Customer Experience Quotient® (CXQ®): the CX drivers of patient interactions
Figure 3: Keeping up to date dominates patients’ needs
Figure 4: Patients don’t judge any type of content to be good or excellent
Figure 5: Pharma’s use of communication channels is not meeting expectations
Figure 6: Most interactions that patients had with pharma firms disappointed
Figure 7: Digital channels have definitively taken over as the primary source of pharma-created information
Patients Engage With Information and Services, Not Companies
The majority of patients in our study have long-term treatment needs, putting them in regular contact with the pharmaceutical industry’s products and services. However, regular contact with a firm doesn’t often mean that patients remember it. We also noted that while patients consume a wide range of pharma services, their actual needs were primarily met by three service types. Our data shows that:
- One in three patients doesn’t know who makes their medicines. Name recognition for individual pharmaceutical companies is low. More than one-third (36%) of respondents in our study did not know the name of the company that’s behind the medicine or treatment they need (see Figure 8).
- Even when interacting with pharma services, name recognition is low. From websites to social media and beyond, 83% of the surveyed patients most recently engaged with one of eleven common industry activities. Even so, one-third of this cohort still couldn’t recall the name of the company involved, the despite the industry’s substantial investments in branding (see Figure 9).
- Patients turn to company websites, social media, and sponsored forums for information. A pharma company’s website, social media account, or affiliated online forum accounted for the three most used services or types of information created by the industry (see Figure 10). In contrast, just 5% of the patients in our study used a chatbot most recently; 1% used a text message.
Figure 8: The name recognition of individual pharmaceutical companies is low
Figure 9: Creating useful services doesn’t guarantee recognition
Figure 10: Patients turn to websites, social media, and forums for answers
Excellent CX Improves Patient Outcomes
Meeting patient expectations and providing high-quality experiences by a pharma company has a clear impact on what patients choose to do after interacting with its services or information. Most often, respondents said that they would either tell someone about the service or information or—damningly for the industry—simply do nothing (see Figure 11). However, we did find that one in four people would contact their doctor. We further found that:
- Poor CX is more than twice as likely to result in patients doing nothing. Our study found that 26% of patients rating an experience as poor said they would do nothing after engaging with a pharma-created service or information, compared with just 10% that said they would take no action if their experience was excellent (see Figure 12). Poor CX also made it more likely that patients would tell their carer, friends, or family about the experience, while almost completely eliminating the possibility of patients enrolling in the program or service. Excellent CX leads to favorable behavior: 12% would save the information provided, 11% would request additional support, and 9% would actually enroll in the program or service.
- Health decision-making is improved by excellent experiences. High-quality CX can improve patient health via benefits in decision-making, disease management, and treatment effectiveness. Excellent CXQ® also makes it significantly more likely that patients will view a pharma company’s medicines or therapies favorably (see Figure 13). For more than half of patients, receiving a poor experience will have a negative effect on their perception of the pharma company, the effectiveness of their treatment, and even their quality of life.
- Excellent CX provides an opportunity for pharma after COVID-19. The post-pandemic picture is still evolving. Our study found that the majority of respondents anticipated no change in how likely they would be to engage with pharma post-COVID-19, regardless of whether the CX provided is excellent or poor (see Figure 14). The opportunity for the industry lies in the 35% of respondents who said that excellent CX would make them more likely to engage because of factors related to COVID-19, compared with the 23% indicating that poor CX would make them less likely to do so.
Figure 11: Patients are more likely to do nothing than contact their doctor
Figure 12: Patients are more likely to act after having an excellent experience
Figure 13: Poor pharma experiences undermine patient health
Figure 14: Excellent experiences could increase patient engagement post-pandemic
Methodology
The DT Consulting / Carenity Customer Experience Quotient (CXQ®) Survey, Patient Interactions 2021 survey was fielded in conjunction with Carenity, part of EvidentIQ, from July to November 2021. The survey involved 543 patients whose primary condition was ankylosing spondylitis, bipolar disorder, breast cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, or rheumatoid arthritis. Patient users of Carenity were invited by email to take the online survey and respondents came from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US. Please note that respondents who use online networks, engage via email, and participate in online surveys have more digital experience and are more likely and confident to interact with companies digitally than those with less experience.
Related Research
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- The State of Customer Experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry, 2018: HCP Interactions
- A Customer Experience Review of One Firm’s Five Major Oncology Websites
Authors
Dominic Tyer
Director
Tim van Tongeren
Managing Partner
Hannah Price
Senior Director
Hannah has more than a decade of experience working with commercial and technology leaders focused on digital and customer experience transformation. She advises organizations on how to evolve their customer offering to take advantage of digital capabilities and develop the internal competencies required to effect this transformation. In her current role as Director of Customer Experience, she leads DT’s customer experience practice, guiding the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms towards creating deliberate, holistic experiences for customers that leverage digital channels and deliver business value.
About DT Consulting
We help life sciences companies lead their large-scale digital transformation efforts for continued customer experience success.
DT Consulting brings deep industry expertise and focus you expect from a strategic consultancy and combines it with Indegene’s recognized strength in building, scaling, and managing digital-first operations for the life sciences industry. With 4,500 employees, 14 offices, and operations in 10 countries, we can support your organization from strategy to execution throughout the digital transformation life cycle. Working together as a single unified global team enables us to get at the real issues, make practical recommendations, and deliver tangible results.
About EvidentIQ
Bringing amplified evidence and science to life.
EvidentIQ is a next generation technology-amplified data science group championing new standards in value creation and innovation driven relevance for customers. The EvidentIQ offering brings a pioneering end to end eClinical solution that meets increasing customer demand across clinical operations and clinical data management needs with a suite of applications within a single integrated cloud platform. By combining its platform with a broad data science service portfolio such as patient recruitment, patient engagement media and a host of RWE late phase solutions EvidentIQ significantly helps customers optimize HTA submissions, pricing and reimbursement needs.
EvidentIQ supports 15 of the top 20 pharma companies through novel RWE solutions and 150+ SMB customers in over 20 countries, including US, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Japan and China.
Learn more at www.evidentiq.com/.
