Optimising Your Digital and Omnichannel Strategy
The final panel of the day, on keeping up with dynamic customer behaviours. My case: if a clinician wants exactly one channel, who are we to design an omnichannel journey around them? Listen first, run multiple small pilots, and scale only what works.
What were the key learnings?
Moderated by a global medical affairs head from Daiichi Sankyo, with commercial digital leaders from Novartis and ViiV Healthcare, the panel covered orchestration, segmentation, feedback and AI.
My contributions: the industry spends roughly ninety per cent of its budget on the ten per cent of healthcare professionals who already listen to us, so use cheap, democratised production to reach the wider clinical audience with content that actually helps. Demand less data up front: when we added a sign-up barrier in front of an education module in my AstraZeneca days, more than two thirds of 1,500 visitors dropped away. And trust your field force as an insight engine instead of hammering clinicians with surveys and feedback requests.
I also talked about cross-functional teams done properly, including a two-person “unusual marriage” of US Commercial and Global Medical Affairs that shipped a website in weeks, and gave a deliberately provocative take on AI: the companies building these models are the Apples and Googles of twenty years’ time, and an industry that is rightly regulated because it puts molecules into people’s bodies should take the lead in arguing that health-adjacent AI deserves the same standards. If we do not, we get disrupted again.
