What does the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ predict for customer engagement in 2023?

Earlier this year, we invited you and your pharma peers to predict how 4 key customer engagement measures might look in 2023: HCP preference for a digital-only or mixed approach to pharma medical educational engagement, their satisfaction with pharma’s digital offerings during recent product launches, the share of marketing budgets in 2023 allocated to digital, and lastly, the percentage of NPS scores among ‘passives’ (those awarding a score of 7 or 8) driven by Cx-related factors (rather than product attributes). 

The consolidated (and anonymized) results – the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ – are shown below. How do they compare with your own predications?

For 2023, pharma colleagues forecast that specialists’ preference for medical engagement that involves digital-only or a combination of digital plus F2F will bounce back somewhat to 69%. According to the wisdom of the crowds, 2022’s dip to 65% was a temporary blip rather than the beginning of a decline, and that the trend towards an increased preference for omnichannel (seen in the previous 3 consecutive years) is back on track.

Similarly, HCP satisfaction with pharma digital offerings during product launches is expected to increase too (this is a new metric for us, introduced last year to add some additional launch-specific insights beyond overall satisfaction with pharma digital). But with 38% (a slight increase on 35% in 2022) estimated to be “satisfied or very satisfied” by the end of 2023, our respondents believe the industry has a lot of work ahead of it when it comes to the crucial launch phase.

Respondents to this year’s survey are also optimistic when it comes to the share of digital in marketing budgets. However, compared to the slight upward trends predicted for HCP preference for omnichannel and satisfaction with pharma digital, the increase here is fairly substantial (+25%): from 28% in 2022 to 35% in 2023. And if the actual data end up aligning with this prediction, the share of marketing budget going to digital will have almost doubled since 2019. 

Another relatively new metric (included for the first time in our revamped Navigator365™ Cx Benchmark research), we asked respondents to predict what percentage of EU5 specialists who give an NPS rating of 7 or 8 out of 10 would say their score was driven by Cx-related factors (defined as: high-quality omnichannel engagements) rather than product attributes (drug characteristics such as efficacy and tolerability, etc). With only a single historical datapoint to extrapolate from, it’s perhaps understandable that the delta for 2023 would be tentative, however, respondents are clear that customer experience will become even more important when it comes to tipping those passive HCPs into much-needed promoters.   

What happens next?

Later this year we will be able to compare these average predicted results from the survey to the latest ‘real’ data from our Navigator365™ Core, Navigator365™ Cx Benchmark and Maturometer™ research. Watch this space!

In the meantime, why not sign up for one or more of our related live webinars: 

• September 19: Upskilling your team with the necessary skills in the Omnichannel age to deliver a superior CX
• October 5: Omnichannel maturity (Maturometer™ 2023 highlights) 
• November 9: Omnichannel Launch Excellence: From global to local

Click the links for more information and/or to register your place (even if you can’t make the live broadcast it’s worth registering to get access to the on-demand webinars afterwards). 

Further reading: Navigator365™, Navigator365™ Cx Benchmark