Where’s the humanity?
‘Patients aren’t data, they’re people’: it’s the stuff of a thousand cliched LinkedIn posts. There is power in segmented personas, maps and data points, but we know that patients are subtler than numbers on a screen.
We’ve inherited the tools to resolve this, allowing us to use that power at the same time as humanising our interactions. But rather than doing so, we’re using AI to abstract patients further, at the very point where it’s hardest to see.
AI scoring every HCP nightly on prescribing propensity and churn risk, or capping personas at six because more than that isn’t ‘actionable’ is moving us further away from our customers. This is a recipe for the isolation of our brands.
Other industries are waking up to this while we’re still napping. Many in retail saw customer service departments as low-hanging, AI-replaceable fruit. Now, they’re quietly rehiring the same teams. The most recent high-profile example of this comes from fintech: Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, has admitted that his company focused “too much on efficiency and cost. The result was lower quality”.
The value of customer service isn’t just about solving or not solving problems; it’s easy to forget that customers don’t see us as we see ourselves. Complaining to a friend about a resolved or unresolved dispute over a coffee is a deeply cathartic experience that doesn’t flash red in a CRM.
The most obvious parallel to this in pharma is in how we’re automating communications. Using AI to automate content distribution might be efficient, but it also erodes trust: our customers already think our communications are undifferentiated and too many. Once they start installing AI-readers to process our AI content, the human is out of the loop completely and we’ve sacrificed our relationship for the sake of efficiency.
We should be using it to boost the human elements of engagement. There are many creative ways to do this, but we never talk about them in pharma. It’s time to wake up. Other industries are making mistakes quicker than us.
How can tech be used to build deeper human engagement rather than deeper abstraction? We need a mixed panel of in- and out-of-industry experts to argue that one out. Fortunately, we’ve got one for you.
