Are pharma teams ready for the next customer engagement model?

The infrastructure is largely in place. Across pharma, most commercial organisations now have the platforms, data pipelines, and automation tools needed to engage healthcare professionals in genuinely sophisticated ways. Decision engines are live. Modular content frameworks are being rolled out. Global omnichannel programmes are running at scale.

And yet, ask most HCPs whether their experience of engaging with pharma has meaningfully improved, and the answer is usually no.

That gap between capability and experience is the central problem facing pharma commercial teams right now and the uncomfortable truth is that more technology is not closing it. In many cases, it's making it wider.

Scaling activity is not the same as delivering value

Picture a hospital-based specialist managing a busy outpatient clinic. Over the course of a week, she receives a follow-up email from a rep she met briefly at a congress, two automated emails about the same product from a different part of the same company, a push notification from a medical education app, and a personalised video message triggered by a CRM workflow.

None of these interactions are badly intentioned. Each one was probably justified somewhere in a campaign plan, but, experienced together, they feel like noise, rather than a coherent relationship. From the outside, over-indexed omnichannel might not look malicious or incompetent, but it does seem poorly joined up. And it is more common than most organisations would like to admit.

The problem is not a lack of ambition. Pharma has been genuinely committed to more customer-centric engagement for years. The language has evolved steadily - from multichannel, to omnichannel, to orchestrated engagement - and real investment has followed. The issue is that adoption has run ahead of clarity. Teams know how to activate channels, but they're less clear on what the experience across those channels should actually feel like.

The expectation bar is now higher

What makes this more urgent now is that HCPs are not evaluating their pharma interactions in isolation.

They are using the same digital tools as everyone else. They book appointments through apps that remember their preferences. They get recommendations that are genuinely relevant to their recent behaviour. They interact with services that feel designed around how they live and work, not around the internal structure of the organisation providing them.

Those experiences set a standard, and pharma, by comparison, often falls short - not because the technology is not there, but because the experience has not been designed with the same discipline. When an HCP disengages from a pharma digital channel, it is rarely because the content was technically wrong. It is usually because it did not feel worth their time.

This shift puts pressure on commercial teams who are simultaneously being asked to demonstrate impact, reduce cost, and do more with less. AI and automation are positioned as the answer, but automation applied to an unclear experience does not produce a clearer one. It produces the same unclear experience, only faster and at greater scale.

The operating model has not caught up

Structural issues are making this hard to resolve. The shift towards orchestrated, data-driven engagement needs more than a technology overhaul. It requires a different way of organising work. Decision engines need clear logic and defined rules, and modular content requires governance and planning that cuts across functions. Connected journeys require ownership that doesn't naturally fit within the structures most organisations still operate in.

In practice, this plays out as a three-way tension. Brand teams are focused on messaging and positioning. Global capability centres are driving consistency, efficiency, and scale. Local market teams are closest to the customer, but restricted in how much they can adapt. Each team has legitimate priorities, but, between them, there is often no one to ask the question that matters most: what should this feel like for an HCP?

The result is that nobody takes full responsibility for the customer journey. Content is produced without consideration of its role in customers’ decision-making processes and interactions are triggered because the system can, not because the moment is right.

Resolving this problem does not require a full transformation, but it does require better understanding of where and when decisions get made, and agreeing who is accountable for the resulting experience.

Starting with the experience, not the platform

The organisations beginning to make genuine progress tend to share one characteristic: they define the experience they want to create first and build towards it.

This means getting specific about five things: the insight that informs what HCPs actually need; the journeys that reflect how they make decisions in practice; the content that serves those journeys, rather than fills them; the systems that enable orchestration without creating fragmentation; and the governance that keeps it coherent as it scales. These are not sequential steps. They are interdependent foundations, and weakness in any one of them undermines the potential outcomes.

Most organisations have made progress in some areas, but few have addressed all five in a connected way. That is where the value gap persists: not in the platforms, but in the foundations underneath them.

Two well-designed journeys will consistently outperform ten poorly defined ones because clarity of experience is a prerequisite for automation to add value. You cannot optimise your way to relevance if the underlying experience is not relevant.

The real readiness question

The shift to a new engagement model is already underway, and the pressure to move quickly is real. Readiness is not just a question of having the right technology in place. Platforms can be procured, data can be integrated, and automation can be switched on, but this means nothing without a solid engagement strategy. Teams must have a clear, specific answer to what good looks like for the HCPs they are trying to reach, and whether they are organised in a way that allows them to design and deliver that against that goal coherently.

The organisations most likely to navigate this well are not necessarily those moving fastest or deploying the most sophisticated tools. They are the ones willing to make deliberate choices: to focus on fewer journeys and define them properly; to align teams around the customer experience, rather than around channels or functions; and to treat relevance, not volume, as the measure of success.

Closing that gap between what is being built and what HCPs value will be the defining commercial challenge of the next 18 to 24 months for pharma digital. It will not be solved by technology alone, but by teams who are willing to ask harder questions about what they are building, how they are building it, and why it matters.

About the author

Simon Young is director of client partnerships at Graphite Digital, working closely with health and pharma organisations to strengthen relationships, shape their digital transformation, and identify opportunities for long-term value and growth.