Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

New Report Looks at Pharma Contact Center Evolution

May 06, 2014

Contact centers, typically considered critical for most enterprises, have slowly made their way into the pharmaceutical (pharma) industry, which plays a huge role in the delivery of overall patient health. While these contact centers present growing opportunities, they bring in their wake a set of challenges too.


Research and consulting firm Best Practices, LLC recently conducted a study around best practices for pharma contact centers. It provided industry metrics and trend insights aimed at helping the diverse population of pharma contact centers improve their performance. The study involved 40 contact center leaders from 35 traditional drug, biotech, medical device, diagnostic, OTC (Over the Counter), and consumer packaged goods companies.

No matter the industry, the basic function of contact centers is the same. They are the “front line” for customer interactions. Contact center supervisors are responsible for customer experiences and satisfaction, operational details, the scheduling of agent jobs, strategies, metrics and other regular contact center functions. In this sense, pharmaceutical contact centers are no different, and as a result they are also not that different in terms of exploring ways to improve their interactions with customers and also other internal and external stakeholders.

The report highlighted how major call centers are looking at ways to increase self-service for customers with common contact center queries. Knowledge bases and artificial intelligence were viewed as ways of increasing consumer access and reducing costs. After all, today’s impatient customer wants instant service and self-service options are a great way to answer most questions and save more complex ones for proper handling by agents freed from fielding more mundane calls.

In addition, pharma contact centers need to adjust to the fact that customers are becoming more mobile. As with all contact centers this means that the ways customers connect and interact are changing and contact centers serving the pharma sector need to keep pace by modernizing technology and expanding connectivity options.

Of course, the extent of technology adoption will ultimately be driven by primary needs and the industry’s basic requirements. For instance, initially agents merely handled patient queries, so phone interactions sufficed. But now, when agent job profiles have expanded and spilled over to product sales, reviews, handling complaints, recall processes, reporting, medical information reviews, and since multi-channel interactions are now the expectation, technology and strategies to handle such interactions need to change.

In addition, increased globalization of contact centers dictates are requirement according to the study that the pharmaceutical industry needs a common technology platform and centralized operations, so that agents across the globe can be acquire expertise and skills in a consistent manner. However, there needs to be flexibility in approach since different regions are governed by different regulations, and adjusting to these regional variations could present challenges to the expansion of contact centers globally.

Pharma may have been slow to understand the criticality of having state-of-the-art contact centers, but they appear to have gotten the message and are investigating and implementing high-performance solutions and best practices.




Edited by Peter Bernstein



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