It's important to enhance customer experience so that existing customers are more loyal

Sheshgiri Kamath, CEO and co-founder, Kapture CRM, expands on why it is important for pharma companies to enhance customer experience, and how the right CRM solution can help companies to identify, address and manage customer expectations more effectively, in an interaction with Viveka Roychowdhury

- Viveka Roychowdhury

What are the market drivers that make it imperative for pharma companies to deploy CRM software solutions? Can you give examples of RoI due to CRM?

Pharma has always been at the forefront of deploying great technologies on the clinical, manufacturing and sales/distribution side. In the last few years, pharma companies have realised that customer experience, for B2B partners (pharmacies, distributors etc.), B2C customers and internal customers is crucial, and this has been a focus area.

Using Kapture, some of the leading pharma companies have managed to bring all interactions with B2B/B2C and internal customers on one platform, irrespective of channels like phone, chat, email, social media and more. This has helped improve RoI significantly by improving customer experience, increasing customer lifetime value, repeat orders and more. Putting out information about products, both clinical and generic, has become a lot easier, thereby again enhancing RoI.

The COVID pandemic has changed pharma companies' interaction with doctors due to social distancing norms. Some hospitals are making pharma medical reps pay a consultation fee to interact with consulting doctors. Can CRM software help in this situation?

Kapture is specifically focused on making interactions between companies, their people and their customers a lot more seamless. Today, pharma companies don't need to send their representatives to hospitals and clinics to complete routine sales tasks. Mediums like chat combined with machine learning-enabled platforms have made even doctors prefer interacting with companies digitally.

How can automated solutions like CRM software help build long-term trust between pharma brands and doctors, and patients?