The Health Pulse

[MUSIC PLAYING] GREG HORNE: Hello, and welcome to The Health Pulse, a podcast exploring how analytics in health and life sciences industry is growing and its repercussions in all our lives. My name is Greg Horne, and I am your host for the series. And as always, we'll be joined by my expert guest to discuss a topical subject.

On this week's episode, we turn our attention to customer intelligence with pharma data. And we have Mike Turner joining us. But before we get to Mike, we've had some interesting episodes around data as it was used in real-world evidence, and data as it's been used to create drugs, and the like. And so we're still looking for questions on that.

So if you want to email us at thehealthpulsepodcast@SAS.com, that's thehealthpulsepodcast@SAS.com, we're really interested to read those questions and comments. And we'll, hopefully, feature those in later episodes as well. But they are certainly helping us to format and think about what we're doing in future episodes, and it's helping me to come up with better questions and more questions for our guests, too.

So without further ado, let's go to today's guest. And that is Mike Turner. Mike, can you do a quick introduction, please?

MIKE TURNER: Yeah. Sure, Greg. And, hi, everyone.

So, Mike Turner. I have been with SAS for a little over 10 years now. I specialize in a topic, in an area, called customer intelligence.

And I worked across a number of industry sectors-- retail. I've worked in financial services. I come from a publishing background. And I've brought a lot of those sort of skills across the years to the business in that customer intelligence area.

For the last year, just over a year, I've been working in life sciences and looking at how we can bring some of the disciplines of customer intelligence into that world of life sciences, particularly around the relationship between large pharma and their HCP network.

GREG HORNE: Brilliant. And for those who wouldn't know, what's an HCP?

MIKE TURNER: A health care professional, so doctor, a specialist in some way.

GREG HORNE: Brilliant. And, Mike, we ask everybody this at the beginning. So when you are not solving the world of customer intelligence issues, what do you like to do outside of SAS?

MIKE TURNER: Well, I'm a keen photographer, Greg. So I'm really, really keen on wildlife photography, and for a number of years, been out there trying to get that wonderful shot that will win you the National Geographic. Nowhere near success yet, of course, but a good excuse to go out and practice as often as I can.

GREG HORNE: Fantastic. My wildlife photography is limited to pictures of my pet tortoise, I'm afraid, and they're not ever going to win a prize for anything. But fantastic-- a nice, interesting hobby. I wish you the best with that one.

MIKE TURNER: Thank you.

GREG HORNE: So let's get into this. So what does the term, "customer intelligence," mean? Let's take this right back to the beginning.

What do you mean by custom intelligence, and how does it apply in life sciences? Who's the customer whose intelligence we're trying to glean?

MIKE TURNER: Sure. Yeah, it's a great name, isn't it-- customer intelligence? It could mean anything, and often, is interpreted to mean just about anything.

I suppose the origins of customer intelligence go back to the world of marketing. And the concept was really straightforward at the beginning. How do we gather enough information about the customer base or prospects to be able to put the right message in front of them? So that very old marketing adage of right message, right person, right time.

But over the years, of course, we've had an explosion in the number of channels that are available for us to communicate with different individuals. And so the term, "customer intelligence," has kind of grown, and it's become all-encompassing. It's most recent incarnations-- we've stopped thinking about just marketing-- it's really any communication we make between our organization, our business, across any channel to a customer.

I guess for life sciences, it's quite a hard concept, because life sciences don't sit there thinking, hey, we've got customers in the normal sense. It's not like a retail experience where we go to a store, or we log on to Amazon, and we make a purchase. It's not that type of customer, but they still have customers.

It's that relationship they have with the health care professionals. Or if they're running clinical trials, maybe the relationships directly with subjects. And they want to manage that communication network with them, recognizing behaviors across all of the different channels that they might communicate with them on.

So that could be a digital channel, like a website. It could be a face-to-face conversation. Or it could be somebody listening to a podcast, for example-- so all-encompassing in that sense.

GREG HORNE: OK, that's really interesting. So the way you described that, it kind of sounds like something that it's kind of everybody's been doing it. So that's a big change. Why are organizations looking to CI now as a discipline if they weren't already? What's motivating them to start looking at it?

MIKE TURNER: So I think what's changed is the balance. If you and I had had this conversation before the horrible global pandemic that we're going through at the moment, we'd have been talking about life sciences and pharmaceutical companies primarily running their intelligence processes through face-to-face meetings, field sales force out there directly sitting with those health care professionals sharing information about the latest drugs, the latest treatments, the latest regimes, whatever they might be. What COVID bought about was an enforced transformation.

So you may have heard the term or you may have heard people talking about digital transformation. For life sciences, COVID has kind of forced that issue to the forefront. Because at the start of that process of COVID expanding rapidly across the globe, lifesize companies were either only partially moving down that digital channel, starting to provide information through digital services, or they had very disconnected digital channels.

Now suddenly, a program that was maybe five years in planning, is here today, and they've got to respond to it today. And so customer intelligence has kind of bumped itself up that priority list. And now, we're engaging in conversations.

We're hearing a lot from pharmas. There's a lot of seminars, webinars, a lot of events, virtual events, out there that are trying to help pharma come to terms with, what is that digital transformation? What does customer intelligence mean?

So I don't think it's new. I think it's just the priority of it has changed. It's gone up the scale a little.

GREG HORNE: Oh, that's really interesting. So one of the examples I use a lot about health care is that we can learn from hospitality. And I often talk about why Las Vegas is like a hospital, and why health care can learn so much from that. Now, I'm guessing that other industries have a maturity curve in customer intelligence that we've yet to see developed in life sciences. So do you have key takeaways from other industries that the life sciences industry might want to use as well?

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, you're right. There are different levels of maturity. And I think the equivalent in CI would be to look to the CPG, the Consumer Packaged Good companies, the likes of Nestle, Mars Corporation, or retailers themselves.

So Amazon are stated, and often stated, as a market leader in customer intelligence. Partially, that's true. Sometimes they don't get it right. But they are by far and away very much more of an experimenter in that world and are always willing to try new things.

I think for life sciences, what would they take away from it? Look at what the CPGs are doing. CPGs are all about trying to build direct relationships with the end user, i.e. The person that drinks the can of Coke, or consumes the chocolate bar, or uses the soap powder, but without displacing or upsetting their distribution network.

Nobody is going to suddenly arrive on our doorstep tomorrow and start delivering soap powder in large boxes off the back of pantechnicons-- outside of Amazon, of course. But they still want a direct relationship with us as a customer. They still want to know what we like about their products, what we don't like.

How do we consume them? Do we use them regularly? Do we use them intermittently?

And so if you're in a life sciences world, look at that network and that chain. Life sciences is a complex world. At one end, we've got people dreaming up new compounds, creating new drugs. At the other end, we've got complex long-term treatment regimes being enacted by medical professionals using products we've manufactured.

It's a hugely complex chain. So look to those organizations, like CPG. See how they are managing the communications with customers, but maintaining that relationship with their network-- the distribution as well.

GREG HORNE: Hey, Mike, that's a very interesting point about maintaining that relationship with customers. And it gets me thinking. I live in North America. So I get bombarded with TV ads all the time from my US channels that talk about, here's a drug.

We want you to take it, and here's all the side effects. And you've probably seen these ads. They're everywhere.

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, yeah.

GREG HORNE: You're in the UK. That isn't allowed. So are there different tactics that people have to use in that sense? How do you engage with a customer if you can't necessarily advertise to a customer?

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, it's a good question. So engagement-- and we're back to where we started, really, with customer intelligence. Engagement is natural behaviors.

It's trying to lead a customer down a natural path-- take them on a journey. It's not about forcing them to do anything. I have to say, one of the things you do see with advertising in some countries-- not calling out America, but you've stated it there-- is that a lot of that advertising is quite aggressive.

It's quite in your face. It's trying to get your attention and make you do something, perhaps something you wouldn't necessarily choose for yourself immediately. It often relies on fear or driven tactics to make you think, ooh, will I get that if I don't take this drug? Will I do this if I don't take that?

Really, what we should be advocating is much more of a natural observation of journeys, and this is where analytics comes in. If you think about customer intelligence, think about what I said at the beginning, we are trying to observe people's behaviors in context across all the different channels that they're acting in. If we can join that information together and we can paint ourselves a picture of what that customer is about, what a customer needs-- and sometimes we can even be ahead of the customer and predict where they might need to go next-- and put a gentle recommendation in front of them. So what we see in the UK/Europe is much more of that guided type of process rather than that more aggressive in-your-face advertising that you might be experiencing there in the US.

GREG HORNE: And how much of this is a blank canvas? Do organizations already have some assets in place? And how data driven are things been in the past compared to where we're going today?

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, again, they're interesting concepts. So I think one of the challenges is that organizations do have assets in place. And what I mean by that is it's the old argument.

If I started a company today-- take automotive. I started Tesla today and I build a Tesla car, what would I do? I'd have one CPU, one processor, one brain, and I'd let that drive everything for me and control everything for me. If I'm an automotive manufacturer that's got 100-year history of building cars, I haven't got one brain.

I've evolved. So it's an evolutionary process, and I've got lots of microprocessors. So a common complaint leveled at organizations is where that occurs, where you've got that evolution, they've got lots of components. And that brings with it a lot of legacy behavior.

So I think a lot of the organizations have got components in place. They might not necessarily, at this moment in time, be utilizing those in the best joined up way. And so there's two approaches here.

If you are in that very fortunate, agile, small organization position of being able to create a strategy, then I think you can look at how you're going to grow and acquire your customer base. You can set up something from scratch. Very few organizations in life sciences are in that luxurious position.

They'll have marketing solutions in place. They may have multiple solutions across multiple brands in multiple countries. And so for them, it's more about, how do they coordinate a strategic view across all of those different assets that they've acquired or built over time? And that, again, is where we can start to think about the analytics, the insights. How do you drive customer insights and maybe then utilize the existing channels that are already there, connect them up with that analytical brain and allow that analytical brain to help utilize those channels in a more effective way?

GREG HORNE: So you make it sound very straightforward, and I'm sure that isn't the case. So think about, now, what are the barriers to developing a CI strategy in this space? Thinking about, are there internal barriers? Are there external barriers? Tell me about some of those things that get in the way.

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, and life sciences is an area where you have very heavy legislation. So in terms of external barriers, they're going through a similar journey in life sciences to financial services. The journey financial services went through-- heavily legislated, heavily governed.

You have to be very careful about communications, very clear. You have to set your protocols up front. Retail doesn't have that problem, of course.

It can make things up on the fly, be far more agile, test things. If it goes wrong, they get some free publicity in the newspaper. And then, obviously, we're all back to normal, and everybody goes back to buying again the following day. So the barriers externally in life sciences tend to be more of those structural barriers caused by legislation, governance, and behavior.

Internally, it's far more interesting, I think. Internally, it's a lot to do with the way the organizations are structured. There's never normally one person responsible for CI, and therein lies the problem.

Any of the very large pharmas have multiple individuals who have a say, or a right, or an ability to make decisions about customer intelligence. And if you've got a global organization, and you've got multiple country managers making their own decisions, trying to get that joined up is a really tough ask of any CEO. Yet, we are seeing the emergence of the chief digital officer now in the world of life sciences.

And that's not a bad thing. But you question, does that individual yet have the authority to impose solutions and drive the level of change that's required? So I think the challenges really are a lot about self-made.

We've given these people the authority to manage their markets, drive the results in their markets. We're now in a position where we're saying, yeah, but we want some of that authority back to create this wonderfully superbrain that will help us drive better efficiencies. And you know yourself. Giving up responsibility and authority is quite a hard thing to ask people to do. So it is very much a bit of a challenge in that sense.

GREG HORNE: Very interesting. And I'm just thinking now, you've talked a lot about CI in terms of marketing product that exists. So how much is customer intelligence used at the start of the product cycle? Do we use customer intelligence to start understanding what the R&D should look at for the next thing to make? Or is that something that hasn't even been kind of considered yet?

MIKE TURNER: So I think in some situations that's feasible, and in others, obviously, not quite the same. It depends what disciplines, what drugs, what treatment regimes, we're talking about. But if you're thinking about the larger-scale manufacturers of over-the-counter treatments, for example, it's absolutely feasible.

And many retailers will talk to you about how they run observational panels of experts who will get together and give feedback on any aspect of a product that's being produced and give you insights that you should then use. Now, again, CI has a wonderful ability. We have this plethora of channels. We have the ability to communicate with people in their channel of preference.

And if we do it correctly, we have the authority and the right to ask them to participate in our development, in our product development. Because at the end of the day, we are manufacturing things that we want customers to want and to use. Who better to ask, then, what's right and what's wrong with our products than the people that we're aiming to use them?

So, yes, I think limited in some cases. But I think, yes, you can involve them. And we should involve them earlier in the process and use CI to drive those conversations.

GREG HORNE: Well, I think they should be asking me about my opinion of anti-wrinkle cream, maybe. No, I jest.

MIKE TURNER: Ah, OK.

GREG HORNE: But that's a very interesting point as well. And I want to then think about, build on, that question and think about the future. So for my last question today, Mike, I want to ask you a bit about, where do you see this going? What are the areas where you think CI is going to have a real influence in the pharma industry? And kind of indicate the time scales you think that might occur over.

MIKE TURNER: OK. I think there's some really exciting things going on in CI, I mean the advent, and we've seen a little bit of this in IoT in pharma as well. But the Internet of Things has opened a new door. So it's kind of a new, passive channel that this out there.

And, again, I'll point you to an automotive example. You think about the car now. We think about cars as connected items.

I'm heavily involved in a couple of master's courses in the UK with a couple of universities teaching digital marketing. And one of the students turned around to me and said to me last year, so does that now mean the car has become a channel? Is it like a giant mobile phone? Is it just a mobile phone on wheels?

And we all had a good laugh about that, and went away, and sat down and had a beer when we were allowed out. And you actually think about, you think, actually, he's not far wrong. We now have the ability to communicate with an individual, as a known individual, in a car.

Now, think about that in IoT in the world of a pharma. We've seen the advent of nanotechnology in tablets that can be taken. We can record journeys through the elementary canal. We can see all sorts of things.

But we also have devices now that are wearable devices, and they're not just Apple watches or Fitbit devices. We're talking about clothing that has sensors built into it. We're talking about asthma pumps that have IoT devices in them.

And if you think about CI and we think about regimes of treatment, for example, for someone with asthma, wouldn't it be a fantastic service to be able to offer to combine weather and pollution data with an IoT-enabled asthma device so that the device recommends dosage based on your personal profile and the area, the location, the situation, you're in? It's not really science fiction. It's already out there. People are already experimenting with these different capabilities around the globe. So, for me, I think you bring IoT, CI, analytics together, that wonderful triumvirate of disciplines and skills, and at that point, we start to be able to enable some really exciting ways of helping customers, or in this case patients, to deliver the right kind of medicines the right time to them and help them stay healthy for longer.

GREG HORNE: Wow. Thanks very much, Mike. That's very insightful. And thank you for joining us on The Health Pulse today.

And I'm very keen to get feedback from the listeners here. Remember, the email address is thehealthpulsepodcast@SAS.com. I really want to think about that last point there that Mike talked about.

How is IoT involved in the use of pharma? But more importantly, again, this is another area where we just heard about social determinate data playing a very key influence in the development of a health or a life sciences channel. And so feedback on that at thehealthpulsepodcast@SAS.com is always gratefully received.

So I want to just say thank you to Mike for joining us today. We will be bringing you another episode in a couple more weeks. So thank you for joining me on The Health Pulse.

I've been your host, Greg Horne. Please like and subscribe to receive further episodes, and we'll be back in your inbox very soon. Thank you very much.

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