Contact centers’ growing role in life science/pharma sectors
Of all the things the pandemic has brought to light, one of the most important is how important the life science and pharma sectors are in our lives. As a society, we’ve also seen first-hand the importance of access to timely and accurate medical information—both the benefits of having good quality information and unfortunately, the tragic downside of having inaccurate information or none at all. Professionally, we see a growing role for contact centers in disseminating all kinds of health and medical information, both in size and prominence.Information is important in every sector, but in health care, it can be literally life and death. Think about that! It can mean the difference between good health and poor health. Or the difference between a practitioner having access to the latest trial information or not. Pre-pandemic, of course, we already knew this. But in the last couple of years, many millions have experienced it first-hand.
Even so, as a BPO specializing in life science and pharma sectors, we’re always exploring—and even helping to define—new ways that contact center technology can be applied to serve our client companies’ needs and those of their patients and health care providers (HCPs). Contact centers would seem to have almost limitless potential for connecting with people in these important ways.
About Alphanumeric Systems
The expanding role of contact centers in life science/pharm tracks in many ways to how we came to specialize in those sectors and partner with NICE CXone. Alphanumeric Systems is a BPO (business process outsourcer), operating in 10 global contact centers that serve over 100 countries and support nearly 50 languages. Our contact center agents were partially remote before the pandemic, which went to 100% during it. Now we’re a hybrid of remote and brick and mortar, which is flexible depending on the needs of our clients.The company was diversified since our founding in 1979, but over the last 20-plus years, we’ve been building a client base in the life science and pharma space. A few years ago, we looked at what we were doing best, and it was in these vertical sectors, where we also saw a tremendous need.
Alphanumeric provides BPO contact center services in the traditional sense but also additional services, like hiring doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. So, we have multiple lines of business, but from the contact center perspective, our biggest services in this sector are patient engagement, clinical trial application support, vaccine, and medical information support.
In 2012, when we began our global expansion, we quickly realized that we needed a contact center partner that could scale with us, both transactionally and geographically. Our search led us to NICE CXone (NICE inContact)—the cloud platform, data centers around the world, 99% uptime guarantee. As we were dealing with expansion, setting up the business, understanding compliance and regulation in different countries, having the right technology partner was critical to our expansion and success. And we’ve been growing with them ever since.
‘A near-perfect patient experience’
Companies and their contact centers in every industry are focused on CX, and more recently, the customer journey. In the life science/pharma sectors, the ‘journey’ takes on additional meaning and importance because we’re talking about patients and health care providers. For patients, especially, the journey can consist of many interactions with a particular brand—over weeks, years, or even a lifetime. As a BPO, we’re interacting with patients and providers on behalf of our client brands, and the quality of these contacts can directly impact patients’ health.
Patient experience, or patient engagement, wasn’t always a top priority in the pharma industry. But there are proven connections between information and engagement and patients following treatment plans. We see our clients, including pharma companies, increasingly focusing on the patient experience/journey. This naturally leads to what’s called ‘patient adherence,’ or patients sticking to their drug regimen. Someone with a chronic condition, for example, may need to take a medication for a long period of time or a lifetime. The longer they take it, the better they feel. They may stop taking it, which will worsen their condition. So, we make sure we provide training, education, patient engagement to keep them taking their therapeutic, or drug, to maintain or improve their quality of life. That’s just one of the things we do.
And it’s why we’re laser-focused on the patient journey, especially as we help drive patient adherence and provide medical information support. On our website, we describe our commitment to providing ‘a near-perfect patient experience.’ For us, it’s more than a marketing tagline—we really believe that, and that in this way, we’re making a real difference. If we can improve the life of a patient and their journey, then we’ve done a good day’s work.
Evolving technology includes digital
Obviously, health care is human-centric. Privacy, data security, and all the regulation surrounding those are always front and center. The pharma/life science sectors have probably had more reservations about the role of technology than some other sectors. But like everyone else, our clients are experiencing the digital revolution and are “going digital” more and more every day.
Technology enables our clients to meet patients and providers where they are. So, we’ve been able to help many of our clients adopt more of an omnichannel approach, incorporating web and email and chat in new ways. The ideal in healthcare-related sectors will probably be an intersection of technology and humans intersect to provide the best possible experiences and journeys.
Superior technology capabilities
We’re proud to have been selected as the sole global provider supporting one of the three COVID-19 vaccines producers and to have had a seat at the table when the pandemic began in 2020. Our client knew we could take this on globally because of our specialized knowledge and expertise and our capabilities—but specifically, because our technology (NICE CXone) enables us to be flexible, adapt to rapidly changing business conditions, and be up and running and scale quickly. Everyone says they can do that now, whether they can or not. But we have some indisputable differences: outstanding—and measurable—CSAT and NPS that we earn for our clients’ brands.
Metrics tell the story
You can’t underestimate the importance of customer satisfaction—and of having the metrics to back it up. Our client companies choose us for these reasons. First, we have a global CSAT rating of almost 97%! In our industry, that’s almost unheard of. Additionally, we have a Net Promoter Score (NPS) that’s just shy of 86%. In pharma and life science, that means patients or professionals (in other words, our clients’ customers) are willing to recommend the therapeutic or drug or company we’re representing to others who may be on a similar journey or have a chronic or life-threatening condition. We are exceptionally proud of that 86%. This is how our clients know how well Alphanumeric is supporting them and their customers in the delivery of services.
Crisis management in tight time frames
In addition to providing “medical-information” support, supporting clinical trials applications, and providing all kinds of information for consumer and commercial customers through our global support centers, we can also deliver crisis management solutions in a very tight turnaround time. Client brands may have “adverse events,” or “product recalls” resulting in the contact center being overwhelmed with calls, emails, web contacts from people wanting a return or credit. In one such situation, we quickly took over for another service provider as the crisis was gaining momentum. We assembled 105 agents in less than two weeks, all trained to support this specific scenario. Within two to three weeks, we saw CSAT begin to stabilize, and we were able to work through the backlog of emails and voicemails that had occurred before.
CXone evolves to meet changing needs
None of this would be possible without (NICE CXone) contact center technology. The technology requirements have really changed over the last five or six years. While the traditional agency IVR is still very much in play in today’s life science or pharma contact center, it’s becoming more about the omnichannel experience—email, chat, social media, self-service. Artificial intelligence (AI) – virtual agents and bots—are coming into play for various reasons, but mainly because people are engaging very differently than they did even five years ago.Having the CXone technology platform that’s evolving in response to how people interact is really critical. We’ve seen that proven out over and over in the last five or 10 years. Health care sectors may not have adopted some technology as quickly as other sectors but now totally embrace omnichannel, especially digital.
In some areas—and for good reasons—life science /pharma have been more reluctant and slower to adopt things like AI, or automated self-service. Because of the nature of the interactions with patients and health care professionals—handling requests for medical information or handling an adverse event, for example—pharma is one of the most highly regulated industries. Even so, we have been able to lead a couple of large global pharma clients through the process of vetting technology to be used in a highly regulated area. New technologies always mean navigating the concerns of legal, regulatory, and compliance as part of the process, and we’ve actually been able to implement some pretty unique solutions from an AI perspective with one of our top global pharma companies. In fact, our solution is now sitting on more than 28 different brands (drug) websites.
One of the most important functions of AI for us is in the background working to return information for requests. We’ve been able to cut those information requests down tremendously, and most can be answered within two seconds, versus some other technology or search engine that might take 30 seconds or more. This would be impossible to do, especially on this kind of scale, without AI.
Still, people-centered
All that said, however, we know that there are segments of the population who feel most comfortable picking up the phone and talking to a live person. There probably always will be, and we are more than able to provide that to our clients and their patients and customers, as well.
But technology is key here, too. A lot of our agents are highly specialized—a specialization that depends on the particular service the agent is hired or assigned to provide. That can mean multiple layers of intense training—on all the technology they’ll be using, on specific drugs we’re supporting (e.g., the COVID-19 vaccine), regional and regulatory differences. We keep detailed records on each agent’s training, per regulatory requirements—and it’s all reported to clients as part of our SLA/KPI performance.
To attract top talent, it’s so important that we’re able to provide the tools that will enable them to do their jobs efficiently. Technology absolutely makes a huge difference: The better the tools, the more satisfied the employee. The more satisfied the employee, the more satisfied clients are going to be.
A look into the future
For us at Alphanumeric, we’re constantly looking at service innovation, which is about not only technology but also process and people, and training. We’re constantly looking at where the market is going, and we feel like we’re in good hands with NICE CXone leadership. In the life science/pharma sectors, I think we’ll continue to see measured adoption of self-service and automation, virtual agents, other new ways to help get information to those who need it. I think we’ll see even more focus on patient engagement and adherence and on what tools and technology can be employed to make that patient journey easier and more efficient and to improve the patient’s quality of life.As hard and tragic as it’s been, the pandemic seems to have increased patient awareness of and interest in their own health, including their risk profiles and the benefits of better understanding their underlying conditions. In fact, we’ve seen engagement volumes go up, across the board. That will continue—and that’s a good thing.
Learn more here about Alphanumeric’s nearly decade-long journey with NICE CXone.