Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - November/December 2007 - (Page 45) Pharmaceutical Executive Europe Nov/Dec 2007 The Mix 45 retained, enthusiastic, and generate good word of mouth. If they’re dissatisfied, they’ll defect, and generate negative word of mouth (and remember that the tendency to say bad things if you’re dissatisfied is far greater than to praise if you’re satisfied). This raises the question of how you generate satisfaction. Meeting or exceeding expectations Everyone has a certain level of expectation about a service encounter. If you meet those expectations, the customer will be satisfied; if you don’t, they won’t. If you exceed them, the customer will be delighted. It’s easy. This means that you need to understand the expectations, design the right service to meet or exceed them, and then train and monitor the sales force to deliver that service appropriately. What does this mean, concretely? Imagine a scenario where you conduct research to determine what kind of service doctors (and other customers) would actually like to receive from your sales force. You then put into place a system (such as those we’ve discussed) that allows the sales force to deliver that service, you train them in its use, but also in the delivery of service satisfaction; and most importantly monitor customer satisfaction continually afterwards. customers on a set of specific measures, “Customer Value Metrics”. Several dozen were tested, and a limited number showed a very high correlation to results. Metrics such as “provides unbiased product information”, “varies the message,” and “points out treatment considerations” had correlations over 20%. In other words, a ten-point increase in a positive rating on any of these metrics translated into over two points of increase in market share. many reps are provided with regular feedback on the satisfaction of the customers they visit? Conclusion I have to confess to a certain bias here — as an academic I don’t actually teach pharmaceutical marketing, but services marketing, so I’m undoubtedly not impartial. However, I like to think that being just a little outside the industry allows a certain objective view… like many other industries in the past, pharma is creeping toward a service model. True, there is an enormous difference in that pharma doesn’t actually generate its revenues by providing services, but on the other hand, its customers expect service from pharma field forces, governments theoretically allow them to exist because they provide a service, and finally, that service is needed. When you put it all together, all those changes, all those muppets, all those hippopotami and butterflies and KAMs and systems and changes, there’s a very good argument to say that pharma management should start taking a close look at services management, because it might very well be the path to take to deal with all these changes. Measuring service quality There are many implications of the move towards a service orientation — too many to be covered in detail here. One thing is certain, however — nothing can be done if it’s not measured. This means that pharmaceutical sales forces must get measured on the quality of the service they provide. We’ve already discussed the impact of new key account management structures, but an obvious implication of such a structure is that compensation will probably have to change. If representatives are visiting non-prescribers, while one hopes and expects that the long-term and broad impact will be seen in performance, the short-term impact can already be measured through things like customer value metrics, and customer satisfaction in general. Whether folded into the compensation system or not, the sales force will not take customer service seriously if they get no feedback on the topic. This means that qualitative feedback on customer satisfaction has to be provided, both at the level of the sales force as a whole, and at the level of the individual. This seems like a daunting task, but don’t forget that almost any serious service company constantly monitors customer satisfaction. In their seminal article “The Balanced Scorecard,”1 Robert Kaplan and David Norton point out that the ‘customer perspective’ represents one of the four crucial perspectives that managers must monitor to gauge the health of their business. In a service organisation, customer satisfaction is the key measure of the customer perspective. How many senior pharmaceutical executives regularly follow shifts in customer satisfaction? And how Reference 1. Robert Kaplan and David Norton, “The Balanced Scorecard,” Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb 1992, p 71–80. The dangers On the other hand, many sales managers speak about the negative effect of strong representative/customer relationships. They say that sometimes the representative becomes too centred on the human relationship and not centred enough on the job at hand. But what is that job? According to the physician, it’s providing information about medicine. As it turns out, physician satisfaction with the information-providing skills of the representative does correspond with performance, and much more strongly than the customer’s overall impression of the relationship. IMS recently carried out a study in the United States to determine the correlation between product performance, as measured in market share growth, with positive responses by About the Author Kevin Dolgin is senior principal, Learning Solutions and Change Management, at IMS Health.
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