Digital transformation: It is time for bold moves, say AbbVie and Viatris digital leaders at Digital Acceleration Roundtable

Digital & Innovation: New advancements in healthcare are one of the few upsides of the pandemic. The medical crisis and considerable investment that has followed is allowing healthcare and pharmaceutical companies to innovate at previously unimaginable speeds.

Julie Fish, Digital and Customer Experience Lead ANZ at Viatris and Tsumi Smith, Head of Omnichannel Experience at AbbVie joined Health Industry Hub Founder Rozalina Sarkezians and co-host Peter Stephenson from West 53rd St Digital to explore how the digital landscape has reshaped customer engagement and the role of customer experience (CX) as a key differentiator. 

The panellists discussed how AbbVie and Viatris have adapted their approach to digital customer engagement and the key learnings that will endure for the organisations. They commented on how digital transformation has enhanced cross functional team collaborations in data sharing to better understand healthcare professional behaviours, preferences and experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Julie and Tsumi also shared their views on how their organisations are quantifying the impact of CX on target customers and how the CX landscape will evolve in the next few years within the pharma industry.

In reflecting on the evolution of digital transformation, Julie commented “Because we’re going through such a transformation, we have every single capacity and opportunity to design that future. What does that look like as far as the resources and the people that we have and the talent we’re attracting? We really need to see an evolution. Are we still recruiting for the same people in the same way that we did 5 – 10 years ago? Are we still doing ads on LinkedIn? If we’re going to bring in that fresh talent, design that larger scope and bring in new thinking, we also have to take a new approach to each one of the things that we’ve done traditionally.”

Tsumi added “You can’t underplay the change management piece with this. Having a mindset to adapt to different working styles and different structures is a huge undertaking and obviously having the leadership behind you to support that vision to go with it. Some of where we are playing is totally uncharted territory, but we need to get to where we’re going.”

If you missed the last webinar in the series, join the conversation here: How pharma marketing is evolving in the ‘new normal’ – Takeda and Novartis marketers join Digital Acceleration Roundtable