What is Omnichannel Customer Engagement?

Omnichannel engagement is a customer-centric approach that strives to deliver the right content to the right customer through the right channel at the right time. It provides customers with a personalized experience that is valuable and compelling, no matter how they choose to engage with your company.

This approach requires certain digital tools such as a CRM, and an emailing platform; and data, both generated internally and purchased. If you intend to reach out to them via email, it's important to have a process in place to compliantly collect and manage e-consents from customers.

However, omnichannel engagement is just not a platform, or a system: it's a way of engaging with customers in a way that is tailored to them. Therefore, defining your omnichannel engagement strategy starts with asking these 2 questions:

• Who are your customers?

• What are your engagement goals?

Knowing your customers means finding out more about:

• their needs (education, patient tools, reimbursement process support…)

• their preferences (channels, technology use, communication style…)

• their behaviors (treatment approach, interactions with pharma…)

• their values (patient point-of-view, detailed data, success rates…)

With your engagement goals clearly established, you can start to develop a strategy to reach your customers in the various channels they use, and present them with content they find valuable, compelling and engaging. Establish the metrics and targets that will be used to measure success, but also look for the data that will provide further insights to guide your next steps.

Your strategy must be integrated and consistent across all channels and functions, so the customer experience is seamless, regardless of how they interact with your company. Similarly, your data needs to be integrated so you can follow the customer experience across all channels.

Omnichannel customer engagement is about building a relationship with individual customers, and like all relationships: it takes time. With each touchpoint, you have an opportunity to learn more about each customer, and by leveraging this information to fine-tune your approach, improve your value proposition and prioritize your resources accordingly, you can strengthen this relationship over time.