For Life Sciences, The Customer Truly Is The Heart Of The Business

Most brands will readily admit that customers are most important to their success, but many are still behind in putting customers first. It is time to evolve.

For Life Sciences, The Customer Truly Is The Heart Of The Business

In conversations with brands, when asked what they think is most important to their success, the reply that without fail comes back is “the customer.” It’s an idea that’s as old as sales itself: the view that the customer is always right, and pleasing the customer is the ultimate goal of business.

For some brands, such as Amazon, Uber, and Google, putting the customer at the centre is old news. These customer experience giants have long understood true customer-centricity and have adapted to it well. In fact, the exceptional customer experience enabled by such brands largely accounts for their successes.

You’ll also find many brands that have all undergone a transformational change that has completely revolutionised their internal cultures, behaviours, and activities. These are the pioneers—yet there are many others for whom customer-centricity still remains an end-game. It’s now up to them to learn from the leaders and evolve their own organisations.

Defining The Foundations

For some industries, putting the customer at the forefront of what they do might mean redefining the customer. In my own specialism of Life Sciences, the customer-first mindset is a completely new idea, and there’ll be an adjustment period. In such industries, we’ve seen that the customer can have many faces: in Life Sciences it could be the patient, or it could be the healthcare professional, or even the payer. In all cases, these are people that have not necessarily been thought of or treated as customers in the past.

Of course, not all employees will “get” customer-centricity. In these cases, I’ve found the best approach is to leverage staff who are true advocates of customer-first principles. These advocates tour the business explaining exactly why customer-centricity is now essential, act as communicators for change, and help bring sceptical members of staff on board.

From this foundation, you can look at practical ways in which the customer can be included in product and service development. This could be achieved through focus groups or, in the case of Life Sciences, patient advocate groups or charity organisations with patient representatives. The single most important thing, however, is to include consideration of the customer in all that you do: from the prioritisation of development projects through to recruitment of new employees.

Let’s look at an example of how this is changing the way patient-centric pharma companies would carry out a drug trial today. With a focus on creating the best possible experience for the people taking part in the trial, the company would set out a well-thought-out plan before the trial starts. This would consider everything, from whether the participant needs to travel far to get to the trial; what the impact would be on their home and work life; what the experience will be for the patient upon arriving at the centre; how their quality of life will be affected during the trial; what their logistical environment is; etc.

Dream Or Reality?

Now this may sound to some like a lofty ambition and, ultimately, a pipe dream, but it’s anything but. The industry today is full of large teams working on such projects day-in, day-out, across every sector, with clients’ businesses completely transforming and benefitting hugely as a result.

This type of work encompasses broader strategy actions, managing technology that underpins communication methods, evolving operations and areas such as supply chain, and so on to synchronise with the needs of the customer.

Remember, individual customers rarely forgive one industry if it offers a bad customer experience compared to another, so it’s important to look outside of your own industry.

And we’re getting to a stage in the near future when there won’t be any blogs on the subject of customer-centricity, because every business will be customer-centric by default. Creating this default can be hard to achieve, but key elements to this are leading from the front, with the board setting an example and inspiring everyone to put customers at the heart of everything that they do.

And when we say everything, it really does mean everything—upstream, downstream, from how you prioritise projects, through to recruitment of new employees—should be built around your customers.

Until that day, you need to look at your business and ask yourself: am I truly customer-centric? I think, in most cases, the answer will be “no.” All that remains then is to decide how quickly you go about remedying this fact—doing nothing isn’t an option. **

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