The future of customer engagement: Expectations, trust and growth

Sandra Forero: What’s happening in personalization that your customers can actually see—and that your CFO can appreciate?

Kim Moran:We have definitely been on a journey with personalization and dynamic targeting. We call it “gen AI-boosted intelligence.” We are seeing more relevant customer discussions, more time in the office, and we measure whether the insight resulted in a patient referral or a script. You can see two- to threefold better commercial results when sales reps use the gen AI suggestions. Also, we combine analog and digital efforts for personalization in our patient services program. Our care coordinators have all the data to have the right conversations at the right time with patients. At the end of the day, the important question for us is: are we meeting patients where they’re at? I would also add that we’ve been very intentional in developing an overall data strategy and approach. We carefully consider which data to collect and how best to use it to serve patients and the healthcare provider (HCP) community, all the while anchoring this approach in a strong respect for data privacy and HIPAA protections.

Catherine Thacker: Our customers can feel a more cohesive experience. When we started on this journey, we started with email. But customers were having disparate experiences as people engaged with us across our e-commerce platforms, apps and kiosks. We asked: how do we take what works in email and create a consistent experience across each touch point? Now, no matter where they’re engaging with us, or the context they’re in, it still feels like we know them.

From a financial lens, it’s twofold for us. As we bring personalization to more channels, we see incremental impact—lift in conversions, lift in sales—and it’s measurable and tangible. The other benefit is simplification: because things were so disparate, we’re able to pull out of some legacy technologies, reduce tech debt and consolidate into a more centralized place.

Our loyalty program has been in existence since 2010, and with more than 60 million unique members, we have all of that interaction data across all of those channels that helps fuel those more relevant experiences and measure what’s working.

SF: Customer expectations continue to go higher. How do you see those expectations from customers changing, and what are they asking from your organizations?

Christian Velmer: I joined a sales representative on a visit to an oncologist’s office. I asked the doctor, “How could we do even better and make engagements with our company for you and your office easier?” He replied with a smile: “Well, this morning, I used Amazon and I ordered a couple of things our office needed.” Then he showed me my pharma company’s HCP portal and he said he’d like to order a sample, but it was not available and there was no explanation of how to get it. We had patient and HCP leaflets for all products, but we didn’t have something easy and downloadable for a quick patient explanation. We had 120 products online, but the oncology products were hidden somewhere and there was no “recently viewed” page like Amazon’s.

That’s how I learned that HCPs don’t compare us with other pharma companies. They compare us with the experiences they have as consumers when they engage with companies who put real customer experience and engagement at the center of all their activities.

CT: As someone who’s engaging with consumers multiple times a month, we are hearing that personalization feels like “Help me find the thing that I am looking for. Help me place my order quickly. Help me make sure that if I’ve got allergens, or if I don’t prefer certain ingredients.” And that’s a common theme, no matter where they’re interacting with a brand or company.

SF: How are you thinking about the team, the talent needs, the culture, the behavioral changes you’re trying to drive? Anything that stands out—or what has worked or what hasn’t?

KM: Technology is the easy part; you can buy it. It’s the people, it’s the change management, it’s communication. If you don’t get that right from day one, none of these technological advances will land and most likely they won’t deliver. You can look at the statistics of how often digital transformations fail. One of the number-one reasons is not bringing people along on the change. That means leading with empathy to understand the fear, uncertainty and adoption barriers around such digital transformations.

You have to have someone who understands the technology and the business serving as a catalyst within the organization, because if there is that disconnect, your technology will not roll out the way that it needs to.

The second part is: the culture and the mindset of your people, having a growth mindset, I can’t say it enough, is essential. We all need to be practicing our prompts so that you can bring up the right output in the right place. But it’s also important to be able to lead your organizations and say, “You know what? I tried it and I failed.” We may create agents that are awesome today, but six months from now we’re going to have to retire them. Your organizations need to be prepared for those types of change.

CV: Try by all means to break the silos within the company, within the commercial team. The last thing the HCP needs is to get different experiences through different engagements with the company. Try to get all hands on deck when you talk about launch experiences or prelaunch. Build integrated cross-functional teams between sales, marketing, market access, medical affairs and patient services and establish shared objectives, clear decision rights and common metrics. Yes, there will be barriers in the system, as different functions may report differently inside the company. But if all the teams work together and create this one perfect, personalized experience for the customer, trust and ultimately growth are created.

SF: Can you talk about your companies’ experience with pilots and scaling personalization initiatives?

KM: For a while, we were trying different things, but the left side and the right side of the company were not talking. While we were great at piloting and trying new technology in each of the business units, we were not scaling.

That’s a big learning lesson as you are testing and trying, either in medical or in commercial or one business unit versus the other, to cross-check, especially if you have great teams. Just because something worked well in one area didn’t always mean it was ready to scale more broadly. We needed better visibility into what was happening across the organization and a way to pressure test which of these pilots really made sense to take enterprisewide.Then you can take these wins of either lifting your revenue or decreasing your operating expenses and scale the company much faster.

SF: The other thing is this idea of trust and trusted AI. The more that we invest in these technologies, the more questions there are around how do we know what we can trust? What is the role of the human? When do we need a human in the loop? When do we not?

CT: We have to be very careful. Consumers are savvy now; they can recognize AI-generated imagery. They can recognize AI-generated copy and it can totally erode their trust. We have to have that human intervention to say, does this sound like it’s in our brand voice? Does it sound authentic? Does it resonate with what we’re trying to achieve and the customer experience we’re trying to deliver? That’s one place where we have an opportunity because ultimately, every interaction is building that relationship.

CV: I’ve found that many patient support sites are transparent about AI use. They will have AI agents you can talk to, or if you’re not comfortable, you can insist on talking to somebody “real.” They give the patient or the general practitioner the option to still engage with a human being. I think companies should at least give customers several options and be very transparent about the use of AI.

KM: The trust component is important not only from an external perspective—think of things like content generation, use of personal data from a data privacy perspective—but also being able to build trust among your employees. I think about going back to that change management discussion that we just had: is AI going to replace me? Build that psychological safety to ensure your employees have a trusted relationship so that we can adopt all of this technology. Being transparent about when we are using AI is another area that we will be needing to build trust. The trust theme is huge, and I think it’s an obligation that we have, especially when we get to work with healthcare and serve patients that need our solutions.

Taken together, these perspectives point to a clear mandate: personalization isn’t about doing more—it’s about making it easier for customers to get what they need, when they need it, with an experience they can trust. That requires disciplined focus on the moments where journeys break down, the cross-functional muscle to scale what works and the governance to keep humans in the loop where it matters. Organizations that pair that operational rigor with empathy will turn rising expectations into durable relationships and sustained growth.