Recent years have brought challenging market conditions, continuous technological advances and growing patient expectations. Science and regulatory policy have been changing rapidly, and so have customer and patient needs. Many believe the healthcare industry has been slow to adapt.
In fact, surveys by McKinsey & Company in 2023 and 2024 revealed consumers reported low to medium satisfaction with many steps in their healthcare journeys. It was clear the industry needed to do more to meet stakeholder expectations.
Customer engagement, in particular, had to become more customer-centric, refocusing around the wants and needs of patients. Patients deserve easy, transparent and equitable access to best-in-class medicines. Providing this is a strategic business necessity and a moral imperative.
As such, the field must make it easy for all patients to get the transformative medicines they need. During the past several years Genentech has taken a multi-pronged approach: embedding emerging technologies, cultivating a culture of continuous improvement and bringing its people along on the journey. Today, efforts are underway to support strategic workforce planning.
Embedding Emerging Technologies
Genentech’s Customer Engagement function has integrated AI, data and analytics, and other digital innovations into its workflows over the past few years. This has resulted in customer insights that could have only been dreamed of a decade ago, enabling the organization to personalize its interactions and, ultimately, deliver more value.
Examples include the following:
Next Best Action, or NBA, is a predictive, AI-driven technology that analyzes multiple data sources to provide timely, targeted insights and suggestions that help Genentech’s Customer Engagement function anticipate customer needs and personalize the organization’s approach. Many companies use NBA. Genentech differentiates itself with end-to-end execution using a unique patient- and customer-centric approach. This approach offers rich customer insights that provide best-in-class NBA use cases.
Healthcare provider personas are profiles based on market research and data that are used to understand customers: their mindsets, behaviors and how they want to engage. Healthcare provider personas are being scaled across the organization’s therapeutic areas.
Free text insights capture key insights from the field that are being synthesized by Genentech’s first large language model, deepsense.ai, to drive critical business strategies and tactics based on real-time customer preferences and barriers.
With these and other tools, the organization can operate in an omnichannel environment—reaching customers where they are and giving them what they need. These powerful measurement tools indicate what’s working and what’s not, so that improvements can be made as best practices evolve.
Cultivating a Culture of Continuous Improvement
It has not been easy to institute, and adjust to, all of these changes. Many customer engagement functions have had to reorganize and retrain workforces to embed these new tools into their workflow. And it’s never-ending; as technology evolves, so does customer engagement. Competing in today’s world requires real resilience.
Having to learn a new way of working is stressful and requires resilience. And it’s a muscle Genentech is developing. “Becoming more resilient not only helps you get through difficult circumstances, it also empowers you to grow and even improve your life along the way,” according to an article on building your resilience published by the American Psychological Association.
Genentech encourages continuous learning to exercise this muscle. And it makes clear the “why” behind the need to evolve, especially for some of its more experienced people, who have successfully done things the same way for years–the “why” is that the organization must pull more levers than ever to remain competitive.
Bringing Staff Along on the Journey
And yet there is a danger of becoming overly reliant on all these technological advances at the expense of the workforce and clients.In fact, a few years ago technology became a primary focus, overlooking the fact that the right people are essential to analyze and implement technology to be effective.
This topic was elevated at the Reuters’ Pharma Customer Engagement 2024 conference. The panel, titled “Re-humanize your Customer Engagement to Rebuild Trust,” discussed that, even as AI, digital and omnichannel tools are used, the approach must be personalized, using timely, targeted insights to deepen the understanding of customers and anticipate their needs.
All of this requires staff to decide what tools to use to build trust and connection with patients and to operate with the compassion required to build the relationships critical to any successful customer engagement function.
The best use of technology is in partnership with people.
Strategic Workforce Planning
Strategic workforce planning is a strategic approach to ensuring organizations have the right people today and into the future. Given the dynamic external environment, Genentech has made multiple adjustments to its work and workforce in real time over the past few years: stopping certain work, pivoting to new areas, and integrating emerging technology into the workflow, all of which is inefficient, creates a feeling of insecurity and, inevitably, impacts the workforce.
With strategic workforce planning, Genentech hopes to gradually make changes by intentionally strategizing where the industry is going by:
- Determining what skills, capabilities and roles we need in the next few years.
- Figuring out where the gaps are.
- Creating a strategic plan to fill them by hiring, upskilling and outsourcing.
Delivering for Patients
It’s clear the organization will continuously refine its model. But a solid foundation is in place.
By embedding emerging technologies, cultivating a culture of continuous improvement, bringing staff along on the journey, and undertaking strategic workforce planning, Genentech will meet stakeholder expectations, maintain its competitiveness and continue to deliver for patients.
For more information, please contact Kate Rowbotham, head of U.S. Customer Engagement, Genentech, kathrynr@gene.com.