Introduction

SPEAKERS:

●      Thyago Ohana, Director, Omnichannel Engagement Capabilities (Web), UCB

●      Yacin Marzouki, Omnichannel & Customer Engagement Lead

●      Jag Singh, International Omnichannel Engagement Medical, CSL

●      Kimberly Friedrichs, Channel Experience Strategy Lead & Web Portfolio Squad Lead, Roche (Moderator)

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Pharma wastes 77% of created content due to insufficient activation budgets
• Adding post-call email follow-up increases intent to prescribe by 23%
• 65% of field engagements lack three-month follow-up, undermining orchestration value
• Digital content integration during field calls drives 2.5x more patient starts    
• Attribution modeling reveals direct contacts drive 25-30% of sales versus 12% for web

Pharmaceutical companies face a sobering reality: three-quarters of the content they create never reaches its intended audience effectively. At Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2025, four industry leaders gathered to dissect why customer engagement strategies continue to underperform despite massive technology investments—and what to do about it.

Yacin Marzouki captured the resource allocation paradox with a vivid analogy:

"It's like we are spending all of the money on shooting the big Hollywood movie and then there's no more budget to do trailers."

The panel's verdict challenged fundamental assumptions about how pharma should structure, measure, and execute customer engagement. Their proposed solutions suggest the industry has been optimizing the wrong variables, measuring the wrong metrics, and organizing teams in ways that guarantee failure.

Breaking the Silos Between Channel and Content

The panel identified organizational fragmentation as customer engagement's original sin. Thyago Ohana from UCB challenged the industry's structural status quo, arguing that customer engagement fundamentally belongs within the marketeer's responsibility rather than separated into specialized digital teams. This separation creates predictable failure patterns. Channel experts lack influence over content strategy. Content creators don't understand channel optimization. Brand teams treat digital engagement as tactical rather than strategic.

The result is what Marzouki called the content crisis. He advocated for shifting budget from field force expansion to content excellence, arguing that IQVIA models tell companies they need eight representatives but never specify what those representatives should actually do or how to maximize their effectiveness through integrated content strategies. The discussion revealed that integration isn't just about reporting lines. It requires shared KPIs, co-located teams, and fundamentally reimagining customer engagement as strategic rather than executional.

Some organizations are already evolving beyond traditional structures. Kimberly Friedrichs described Roche's transformation to patient journey partners who connect on challenges doctors see with patients and link them with the right people in the organization. This role evolution reflects a broader shift from product promotion to problem-solving partnerships. Companies maintaining siloed structures will continue underperforming regardless of technology sophistication. The panel emphasized that channel expertise must elevate content, and content strategy must inform channel selection—not as sequential processes but as integrated capabilities within unified commercial teams.

The Measurement Crisis Perpetuating Poor Decisions

The panel expressed unanimous frustration with pharma's continued reliance on metrics that fail to capture actual impact. Marzouki issued a direct challenge, noting that companies still measure reach and frequency as the main success criterion without any way to measure shift in adoption ladder or prescribing behavior digitally. Without behavioral impact measurement, companies make multi-million dollar decisions based on activity rather than outcomes. The consequences extend beyond wasted resources. Reach-based metrics incentivize channel proliferation over channel effectiveness, content volume over content relevance, and customer interruption over customer value.

Ohana described one solution gaining traction: channel equivalence frameworks that benchmark digital channel impact against the known value of field interactions, providing relative performance indicators even when absolute attribution remains elusive. The approach requires measuring how each channel influences clinical decision-making rather than simply tracking engagement volume. More sophisticated approaches are emerging. Friedrichs highlighted recent work from Roche data scientists who developed methods to estimate the relative contribution of different engagement channels. Their analyses show that direct customer interactions remain the strongest commercial driver, while web channels also demonstrate a measurable and meaningful impact.         

Jag Singh from CSL emphasized that measurement evolution requires both external and internal KPIs. He encouraged thinking about the value of internal KPIs like time to customer, which can prevent organizations from perpetuating initiatives that deliver theoretical value too slowly to matter commercially. The measurement gap has real commercial consequences, perpetuating over-investment in high-reach, low-impact channels while starving high-impact opportunities of resources.

Content Without Activation Is Invisible Value

The 77% content waste rate represents not just sunk creation costs but massive unrealized commercial value. The panel traced this waste to budget allocation patterns that prioritize creation over distribution. Global teams exhaust budgets producing sophisticated content assets. Local markets receive minimal activation budgets. The result is high-quality content that never reaches its intended audience at scale.

When content does reach customers effectively, impact is dramatic. Singh shared compelling evidence that when digital content is utilized in field promotional calls, it equates to 2.5x more new patient starts. Pre-launch field medical education leads to 1.5x elevation in treatment adoption. These engagement and performance multipliers reveal the commercial cost of poor activation strategies. Every field interaction without integrated digital content represents unrealized commercial potential. 

Ohana framed the activation challenge as fundamentally about relevance, stating that relevance is the new reach and even the new consent. Without relevant content reaching customers through optimized channels, even the most sophisticated orchestration engines run empty. The panel emphasized that relevance requires understanding not just professional preferences but individual customer contexts, challenges, and decision-making frameworks.

The discussion revealed that activation excellence requires three capabilities most organizations lack. First, systematic processes for repurposing content across formats and channels rather than treating each asset as single-use. Second, media activation budgets to drive traffic to owned content properties rather than assuming organic discovery. Third, tight integration between content creators and field teams so representatives understand and utilize available assets. The panel's diagnosis suggests content excellence and strategic activation represent higher-value investments than channel proliferation.

The 65% Orchestration Opportunity

The discussion revealed a massive orchestration gap undermining current strategies. Singh introduced sobering data indicating that 65% of all engagements are fragmented in the field, meaning if a field rep or MSL has seen a physician, 65% of the time there's no follow-up within three months. This fragmentation means pharma achieves only 35% of potential value from its most expensive channel.

The root causes extend beyond technology limitations. Many organizations lack systematic follow-up protocols. CRM systems capture interaction data but don't trigger coordinated next-best-action sequences. Marketing automation exists separately from field force management. The result is expensive one-off interactions rather than cumulative value-building journeys.

Yet the solution isn't necessarily more complexity. Marzouki advised pragmatism over perfection, noting he would not chase omnichannel per se because going from face-to-face to one additional channel has very low effort and high return. Intent to prescribe increases by 23% if you send an email post-call. This insight challenges the assumption that customer engagement maturity requires simultaneous orchestration across eight or ten channels. Simple two-channel coordination delivers measurable commercial impact with minimal implementation complexity.

The panel emphasized that maturity progression should follow value realization rather than capability accumulation. Organizations should master two-channel orchestration before attempting four-channel coordination. They should prove measurement frameworks at country level before pursuing global standardization. They should achieve content activation excellence before expanding content production capacity.

The panel's long-term vision suggests even more fundamental transformation ahead. Ohana described the ultimate destination where every proactive push interaction represents an error in the system. Customer engagement will become invisible—present but not interruptive. This vision of trigger-based, customer-need-driven engagement represents a fundamental shift from push to pull models. Rather than interrupting physicians with promotional messages, future engagement architectures would surface relevant information precisely when clinical decisions require it. While acknowledging this future extends beyond 2030, the direction has immediate implications for how companies build engagement architectures today.

To get you highlights of Pharma Customer Engagement EU faster, we are using generative AI technology to summarise the transcripts of the sessions. If you have any feedback about the summary, please contact lucy.fisher@thomsonreuters.com.

"I was told that you can never have it, it's too expensive. So that's why I started to gather people with HPP in Denmark to try to make some visibility, to try to give us a voice," Krabbe said. "And we're only like 50 people in Denmark at the most diagnosed with HPP."

Communication Breakdowns in Clinical Care

Beyond access barriers, fundamental breakdowns in patient-physician communication prevent optimal care even when treatments exist. Vigier illustrated this with a clinical assessment story where a myasthenia gravis patient repeatedly answered "no problems chewing" to standardized questionnaires. "The nurse asked the second question. She said, when was the last time you had a steak? And the patient said, oh, no, I never have steak. I can't chew them," Vigier recounted. The anecdote reveals how consultation quality and question framing directly affect clinical data capture and treatment decisions.

Krabbe described her own clinical encounters with similar frustration, highlighting how time constraints and narrow specialty focus create incomplete patient assessments. "My disease is much more than a bone disease. It's a systemic disease. It's also muscle weakness, it's pain, it's a lot of other things, fatigue and such, brain fog. We didn't talk about that at all," she explained.

The knowledge gap extends beyond consultation quality to fundamental disease awareness among treating physicians. "Sometimes I get doctors who cannot pronounce my disease or who don't know that there is a drug and who don't know about the disease. They just look it up on like Wikipedia sites or something," Krabbe said. This knowledge asymmetry places patients in the untenable position of educating their own physicians while simultaneously seeking treatment.

Asikainen's experience reveals an even more fundamental gap in care continuity for rare disease patients without available treatments. "None of my diseases get any kind of ongoing survey or checkups from doctors. The only doctor that I see regularly is a dentist," Asikainen said. "So that tells a lot about the way—if you don't have a treatment or a cure or any kind of medication for your rare disease, you won't even necessarily be seen by a doctor for it."

From Patients to Advocates: Navigating System Failures

Both patient advocates described their pathway into advocacy work not as voluntary engagement but as necessary response to systemic failures. Asikainen's motivation was deeply personal, rooted in her own experience navigating multiple rare disease diagnoses simultaneously.

"I have four rare diseases myself. I'm a rare disease and disabled person," she explained. "And that brought me into patient advocacy because we were mistreated by the system and I was put in a place, by the system, by the society, that I could not get out of myself."

Krabbe similarly described her two-decade healthcare journey using language that captured the isolation and resource scarcity rare disease patients encounter. "I've been walking through the healthcare system for 20 years. I have three rare diagnoses," she noted. "But I've been walking—it's been a desert walk, trying to get help, trying to find a bus stop to move on and get some help."

Asikainen's advocacy work extends beyond individual patient support to legislative reform addressing systemic barriers. "We also have problems with research laws in Finland and usage of patients' information. So I do a lot of legislative work to get that on the side of rare disease patients so that our lives can be easier via the laws that govern us," Asikainen explained.

The financial burden on rare disease patients compounds clinical challenges. "The financial burden for rare disease patients is disproportionate compared to any other patient group out there. We are taking more on our individual backs and we still have a legislative uphill battle on getting things like disability retirements and sick leave," Asikainen said.

Krabbe emphasized the need for coordinated care that addresses patients holistically rather than fragmenting treatment across disconnected specialists. "For my co-patients to experience that they actually get a doctor that they feel like they're getting help and the doctor is seeing the whole patient, not just a single toe or foot or something," Krabbe explained. The burden of coordination falls to patients least equipped to manage it.

Redefining Pharma's Customer Model

Vigier argued that the pharma industry must fundamentally rethink its commercial model to address these systemic challenges. "We can't continue to consider customer and focus on super sophisticating our customer engagement when we talk about HCPs only," she stated. "We need, we must—of course payers are not hurdles, they are our customers. Society is our customer and patients are our customers."

The rare disease context offers particular urgency and opportunity for this transformation. "If we get it right in rare diseases, we will get it right in all the rest," Vigier argued. The logic suggests that engagement models effective for ultra-rare populations will scale effectively to larger therapeutic areas.

Central to this reimagining is recognizing that stakeholder groups operate with fundamentally different value definitions. "The biggest conundrum we're facing as pharma, in a way, is the very different perceptions of value by the different groups of customers, decision makers," Vigier explained. The solution requires convening rather than convincing—facilitating dialogue where stakeholders collaboratively define value.

Data supports pharma's ecosystem impact potential when engagement extends beyond traditional HCP audiences. "Do you guys know that rare disease patients spend on average about five years going from doctor to doctor before they get the first diagnosis?" Vigier noted. "And one thing that I was impressed by was there is a study lately that showed that basically as soon as there is an approved EMA treatment or FDA treatment, an approved treatment in a rare disease, that time is diminished by a factor of four."

Patient Education as Strategic Imperative

When asked how pharma could best support patients, Asikainen emphasized capability-building over awareness campaigns. "I'd say the key number one is educate the patients and you do that via the patient organizations. When we educate the patients to talk about themselves in a more non-passionate way to the doctors, we get a better response from them," she explained. "But we also need to educate the patients about the whole field and the bureaucratic jungle out there."

Asikainen described the complexity patients must navigate as requiring professional-level expertise. "It's not that simple that you just get sick and then you get a treatment—it's not like the flu when you have a chronic rare disease. It's a whole different ball game. And I say that it's being professionally sick because you're advocating for yourself," she said.

Building Trust Across the Value Chain

The session concluded with a call for trust-building across all stakeholder groups as the foundation for systemic change. "The last thing that I really would love to see more and more is trust between the stakeholders in the rare disease field. It's not just about us patients trusting the doctors, but the doctors trusting us patients, but also the pharma companies, the payers, the systems," Asikainen said.

Vigier synthesized the discussion into two core imperatives for the pharma industry moving forward. "HCPs are a diminishing part of your customers. There is a rising and a very important need to sort of consider the same way we're considering our HCPs as customers to consider patients, support their education, support their understanding and the relationship," she stated. "And the second thing I would like us to leave with is trust. Let's build that, let's use that." These twin priorities—expanding customer definition and building trust—frame the transformation required for pharma to effectively serve rare disease communities.

To get you highlights of Pharma Customer Engagement EU faster, we are using generative AI technology to summarise the transcripts of the sessions. If you have any feedback about the summary, please contact lucy.fisher@thomsonreuters.com.

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