Building comprehensive NBE capabilities for a global pharmaceutical company

An international pharma company specializing in neuroscience wanted to strengthen its relationships with healthcare providers (HCPs) by leveraging a data-driven omnichannel strategy while keeping pace with industry standards. The company partnered with Slalom to build an organizational capability to leverage data and insights to provide the right content, in the right channel, at the right time, to the right customer​. 

This transformation required a shift to Next-Best-Experience (NBE) technology and a communication recommendation system, which creates a human-centered approach of engaging each customer uniquely for an optimized, personalized journey to ultimately build stronger relationships, drive sales, and benefit more patients.

The Slalom team identified meaningful, purposeful HCP experiences and leveraged existing medical data (Rx, diagnosis, and fact claims), behavioral details (HCP historic prescribing preferences), and data points (predictions on patient pool growth) to support the rationale for the NBE and build the HCP customer journey. Slalom worked with many teams across the client’s organization to understand their digital capabilities, clarify ownership and collaboration pathways, reduce functional silos, increase knowledge-sharing opportunities, and resolve issues around data deserts and legal barriers.

To apply the data effectively, Slalom built a custom, data-driven tool into the company’s current infrastructure and customer relationship management system for automated insights. This tool provides recommendations on why, when, and how to contact the HCP. For example, by leveraging Rx and diagnosis claim data with machine learning (ML) capabilities, the tool could predict an increase in patients fitting a specific product profile, triggering the sales representative to receive an NBE suggestion for engaging with the HCP. The NBE tool workflow allows the representatives to choose how to proceed with the recommended action and review a backlog of recommendations. It also provides calendar invite calls to action, allowing them to easily schedule the NBE with the HCP directly or create a reminder on their own calendar. A feedback loop mechanism enables the sales representative to indicate whether recommendations were helpful, and the tool applies these evaluations to future recommendations using its ML capabilities.

The new embedded NBE recommendation system is enabling omnichannel touchpoints and bringing focus and ease to the relationship between HCPs and the company. The company observed 85%+ NBE adoption in less than six months, and sales representatives noted that HCP interactions were overwhelmingly positive. This successful omnichannel digital transformation utilized Slalom’s customer-first approach to derive insights across many functional departments to architect a journey that effectively and proactively engaged HCPs, grew sales, and brought care to more patients. Slalom has worked with the client to expand this system globally across their organization and is now applying it to new therapies, drugs, and brands. 

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