Although not a stranger to innovation, as one of the most prominent worldwide investors in R&D, the pharmaceutical industry takes a more traditional approach to how it operates and has been slow to adopt new technologies in its external-facing activities with partners, employees or customers.
Conventionally, pharma companies would handle customer service and engagements manually, with time-intensive processes and, due to the vast quantities of data contained, error-prone.
Yet, as globally, customer expectations for digital, anytime, and anywhere interactions increase, virtual assistants are beginning to impact the pharma industry as well, redefining how companies interact and engage with their external audiences.
Furthermore, with intelligent virtual assistants, pharmaceutical companies strengthen their relationships with healthcare providers and pharmacies by enabling an always-open, direct channel of communication. And as consumers become empowered, satisfaction rises, positively impacting the sales bottom line.
In late 2019, the pharma company was increasingly feeling the effects of a rapidly changing business environment in CEE. Its sales team, comprising 200 experienced professionals covering all 41 counties and the Bucharest municipality, was under growing pressure to efficiently respond to the informational needs of their primary customer: pharmacies.
Under the threat of declining customer relationships, the company sought ways to use the right technology to optimize time efficiency and ease the daily engagements of its medical reps.
The company’s 200 sales representatives were in urgent need of a solution that would allow them to plan and hold better, more immersive sales events. At the same time, customers could seamlessly obtain the information they needed without delays and at any time.
The solution was TOBBY, an intelligent virtual assistant designed on DRUID technology to facilitate interaction with customers by offering round-the-clock FAQ support. Additionally, TOBBY is an invaluable asset in the daily events that sales reps must prepare and deliver in pharmacies. Thanks to its back-end integration with the company’s product catalogues and events schedules, it simplifies events by providing meeting rooms, allocating available trainers, and configuring the needed curricula and starting hours. Following TOBBY’s implementation, customers can ask it questions and, thus, remotely and swiftly check the schedule and content of presentations, interact with the presenters or identify the logistic details for attending the meetings. On the other end, TOBBY proves its worth to the sales team by offering them a wealth of important customer information.
It records real-time interactions with customers, generates visit reports, and centralizes questions from evaluation forms, thereby allowing sales reps to extract or analyze the presentations’ impact quickly. The virtual assistant can also support managing product stocks.
Technology can be both disruptive and beneficial, even in a complex and regulated industry as the insurance one. Virtual assistants are now emerging as a time and resource-effective solution for handling multi-faceted interactions.
As the number of implementations increases and the technology matures, they will likely change many aspects of the sector and help it keep up with customer demands for fast digital access. Customer interactions will be shorter and more meaningful, with each of them tailored to each client’s exact, specific needs. New models of doing business that capitalize on how technology helps insurers meet changing consumer demands are essential.