So, to ask the question many people don’t like to, what does it actually mean?

A cursory Google search will reveal all kinds of explanations, including how omnichannel is different from multichannel. But, in simple terms, omnichannel is about transforming customer engagement to ensure that a cohesive, and joined up, message is delivered across all personal and digital channels (including the field force) – not just hitting customers with more channels but connecting the dots across them to form a unified and effective story.

The result: a better customer experience and more impactful message delivery for your brand (which should equal higher sales, if your positioning is solid).

Assuming that sounds good, the next question from senior leaders is: what do we need to deliver this?

Most often, the answer to this question is ‘technology’ – CRM and all the systems that sit around it, enabling effective customer profiling, content management, next-best action, and so on. For sure, you cannot deliver omnichannel transformation without this technology. However, given that there are so many good technologies around, why have so few companies achieved omnichannel nirvana?

In my experience, the answer is that, while technology is a key enabler, to view achieving omnichannel maturity (Figure 1) as predominantly a technology project is a path to failure. And I still see too many companies charging down this route.

Figure 1: True omnichannel maturity requires both technology and fundamental shifts in the operating model to become more customer- rather than brand-centric.

What else is needed then?

Here are some key areas that deserve at least equal focus as technology, to deliver real success.

Vision and leadership buy-in

As mentioned above, the initial challenge is that there is still a lack of understanding of what omnichannel means. There are multiple interpretations of it, even where it’s understood.

Before embarking on any transformation, this needs to be aligned across all levels of leadership, from C-level executives to the leaders who will deliver this change. This vision needs to include not only clarity on the new operating model, but also how this model will be delivered (encompassing all the following points), what success looks like and how it meets the needs of all stakeholders internal and external (including investors / shareholders).

Critically, it also needs buy-in to embrace a mindset that is first and foremost customer-centric, rather than internally brand- or function-centric.

Changes in processes and internal alignment

Changing the customer engagement model also requires changes to the current processes and functional setup, as these are all geared around the ‘old’ model.

This encompasses numerous areas, for example:

• Brand planning, which needs to be coordinated across all customer-facing functions (commercial, medical, market access, corporate communications) to ensure a cohesive strategy.
• Creative / content production, which needs to adapt in to enable a more modular approach to telling the story piece by piece, allowing dissemination over time and different channels as part of a single, cohesive story.
• Compliance, which will need to operate more nimbly when approving customer-facing materials.
• Field force operations, which must tightly coordinate with central activities, whether within commercial, medical or market access.

With regards to brand planning, to achieve true omnichannel maturity this should actually be ‘customer planning’, starting with their needs and desires to think about how to best share brand information, rather than vice versa. This is a key component of the industry’s long-voiced promise to be more customer-centric.

At its core, true omnichannel transformation also therefore poses questions around the fundamental structure of companies. For example, should there even be separate medical and commercial functions when they are both tasked with providing customers with relevant information, albeit of different types?

That’s a much bigger topic for another article…

Comprehensive change management

Change management is one of the most overlooked aspects of any transformation, in my experience.

Think about all the effort spent on brand marketing where we are trying to change the behavior (prescribing) of physicians. It starts with extensive market research, which feeds into testing and retesting the positioning, then building out the experience architecture (what the barriers to change are and how we move customers through them), into the engagement experience (how we get the message across), and extensive measurement to track how we’re doing and what needs to change.

Now think about how much of that same effort we typically apply to internal teams when trying to change their behavior to operate in a more ‘omnichannel’ way. Why is it different?

Change management is another whole topic, but it’s so much more than communication. It encompasses every element listed here and, critically, requires securing the right input from internal stakeholders to understand their current beliefs and behaviors, plus securing their input and buy-in to the change being made.

My advice: engage early, understand their situation, and involve them in the solution. Don’t suddenly spring a new ‘solution’ on them that they have heard nothing about and had no input into.

Effective data management

Data, data everywhere, but not a drop of insight!

We live in a world where massive amounts of data are created every day, and data sits at the core of any effective omnichannel system. It enables a deeper understanding of every individual customer, to the level of n=1, which allows more personalized, effective approaches.

But only if the data is as complete and accurate as possible.

This requires an understanding of data accuracy at the point of entering the system, identification of gaps, the ability to integrate disparate data sources together (interoperability), and ongoing cleansing / maintenance to ensure it’s kept up to date. Without this, even a well-structured data system will quickly become redundant.

Also, make sure the system is set up so that those who know the customer best have the opportunity to challenge the data as part of the maintenance process. This is principally the field forces operating on the front line, because – shock and horror – sometimes they might know something that your data machine doesn’t!

Even before you bring in data scientists and smart AI applications, customer profiling needs to embrace both secondary data sources and first-hand human knowledge.

Fresh incentives

Omnichannel transformation can often feel like herding cats to those leading it. And how do you herd cats? Simple, you move their food!

Objectives and incentives are an often overlooked area in customer engagement transformation. At its core, a more customer-centric omnichannel approach seeks to improve the quality of each interaction, not just (or indeed at all), the frequency of interactions.

This needs to be reflected in the personal objectives and incentives for everyone involved in making it happen, from the senior global leaders right through to the local sales reps and MSLs. For example, trying to get sales reps to invest time in understanding how to deliver more modular content and integrate their activities with central marketing approaches, like email or webinars, is never going to work if they remain incentivized by the number of calls, they make every day.

Instead, it’s important to work back from the desired end model (and what success looks like in this) to define overarching KPIs and translate these into specific objectives for all internal stakeholders involved in driving the change, with their incentives linked to these.

In summary, achieving omnichannel maturity is about carefully considering all aspects of the organization that need to change – people, systems and processes. The above factors are key components of this, and I’m sure you can think of more.

Technology is an important part of achieving this maturity, within the ‘systems’ bucket. However, viewing omnichannel transformation as a predominantly ‘technology’ problem / opportunity / project won’t deliver success.

You could even say that delivering true omnichannel maturity requires ‘omnipotency’ – the power to influence and lead many others, across every function, on this journey. I look forward to working with more Global Heads of Omnipotency on transforming our industry!

In the early 2010s, when hype about digital transformation of life sciences was at its peak, the ‘death’ of the sales rep was loudly proclaimed, with the potential for online channels to deliver an efficiency in engaging HCPs that a fully loaded rep spending time driving around could not match. But here we are, in 2023, and it hasn’t come to pass.

Then, the narrative moved onto the concept of the ‘orchestrator rep’, who would remain as the central controller of dialogue with the HCP, empowered by an array of digital channels and novel content formats, to help them put all the notes together into a beautiful brand symphony, rather like the conductor of an orchestra. Again, while we are seeing progress, we still have some way to go before this becomes a reality.

And here we are in 2023, and everyone is now talking about Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT, in the context of how it could replace reps (and many other roles). Do I think it will? Well, as financial advisors would say, “past performance is not an indicator of future success”, but I think this prediction will also prove to be not entirely correct.

So, what is the future of the field force?

Well, as is often the case, the reality is a little bit more nuanced. I’ve said before that we need to move away from this notion of ‘digital versus person’, or ‘offline versus online’, because in reality we need both.

The last few years of Covid have, to me, clearly demonstrated two things. Firstly, digital has been vastly underutilized and the only barrier to its adoption if changing people’s behavior (which is a pretty big one, to be fair). Secondly, as human beings we crave actual interaction with people and even the best digital engagement cannot replace this (OK introverts, I hear you, but it’s generally true).

The future of the field force is therefore about enabling reps (and MSLs) to smartly use both face-to-face interactions and digital channels to take customers on a journey, knowing which piece of information is relevant to which customer at each specific moment. In effect, I do believe in the ‘orchestrator’ principle, but it’s just taken us a while to get there.

A few pieces are now finally dropping into place to enable this to happen:

• CRM systems that are integrated across central teams (marketing, medical) and field forces, allowing coordinated data capture and visibility on activities.
• Dynamic customer experience architecture, rather than static personas, which enables building of a more realistic customer journey that can adapt over time, as customers evolve their thinking.
• Modular content approaches, which enable field forces with ‘bite size’ chunks of the brand story (and more nimble content approval processes to facilitate this).
• Better training and incentives for field forces, aligned to this new paradigm and moving away from archaic measures like ‘call frequency.’

This is all helped by more digitally native individuals coming into both the field force and central marketing and medical roles, plus now also emerging into senior decision-making positions.

But there is another key aspect to where I see the future of field forces heading, which is better coordination across silos, especially marketing and medical.

I know that there are entirely valid reasons why, from a regulatory perspective, life science companies (and I’m focusing here more on the prescription pharmaceutical industry) have firewalls between the medical teams, who focus on ‘above brand’ science, and the commercial brand teams.

However, when you put yourself in the shoes of a customer (the HCP), it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have two disparate groups of people coming to you telling you different parts of what should be one big, cohesive story.

To adopt a truly customer-centric way of engaging, the industry needs to find a way to tackle these compliance issues and have a single in-field person coordinating their messaging for the customers (ideally across therapeutic areas and products, but in the short-term at least within each brand). This individual could then truly coordinate the needs of a customer on-demand, delivering to them the right above brand and product information, when they need it.

As an aside, I reference this more coordinated approach in an article I wrote pre-Covid, called ‘Building a new type of pharmaceutical company – a vision for pharma 2.0’.

It might sound like a challenge to achieve this, given the decades-old internal silos that have been built up around different functions, but some companies are exploring this very route. Initially, these experiments are focused on key accounts, where a central Key Account Manager is coordinating with other functions, but I think this model will expand.

Finally, what about the potential for the AI to disrupt the model?

I am a firm believer in the adage of ‘a good [insert role here] who uses AI is better than a good [insert role here] or AI alone’. OK, so my version isn’t the snappiest quote, but it does apply to so many roles inside life sciences and beyond.

The point is that AI has a very valid place in helping the field force move customers along a meaningful journey, including factoring into things like ‘next best action’ to suggest what should come next. But you still need, in my view, the intuition and emotional intelligence of the human being to interpret this.

To come back to the question in the headline – yes, I do think it’s time to repurpose the rep (or MSL) – and has been for a while, but we’re finally seeing the combination of technology, process adjustment, training and behavior change all come together to deliver this.