Conversational AI: Transforming engagement in pharma marketing

[00:00]
These are very valuable to Brands and they spend millions of Dollars each year trying to develop these programs, but they’re not able to capture that bottom of the funnel this allows you to do that and get these folks to take the meaningful high value actions that brands are focused on every day.

[00:24]
Hello, my name is Larry Dobrow. I’m from MM+M. And I’m thrilled to be hosting today’s podcast conversational AI transforming engagement in Pharma marketing but a podcast I’m joined by Matt Titus from Swoop.

[00:42]
Matt welcome, thank you for joining us today. Hey thanks for having me really glad to be here. Let’s start with the basic one for those who aren’t aware give us a little overview about Swoop sure no problem. So Swoop enables pharmaceutical and life Science brands to reach their ideal DTC and HCP audiences that critical moments in their health journey using predictive technology to target the right customers before they’ve been diagnosed or become nonadherent utilizing ml and AI and real-world data. We create brand exclusive audiences of patients and providers for omni-channel healthcare companies then once the right customers have been targeted brands can really Drive the bottom of the funnel engagement through swoops proprietary medically trained mlr compliant conversational AI that’s really built on a privacy Foundation that we’ve designed swoop is both hipaa, certified and NIA credited we’ve done more than 12,000 unique.

[01:42]
Get audiences for 42 the top 50 Pharma companies and we’ve developed conversational AI agents for over a hundred brands globally that have engaged in 1.3 billion conversations with patients and HCPs, so we’ve been around the block and we’re happy to be here to talk about it more today. Really you mentioned over the course of that answer on the conversational AI agent sweep recently launched that what problem is that solving for the market. Yeah, so Pharma marketers spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 7.5 billion dollars here in the US in both digital and TV advertising to try to get patients and HCPs to take an action that would lead them to essentially get to a scribing decision or prescribing conversation with their doctor historically those ads and digital advertising have really tried to dry folks to a website a website’s have been around since.

[02:42]
1991 there are 35 year old technology anyone. That’s ever been to a brand.com knows it can be super cumbersome. There’s a lot of great information on it, but it’s really hard to navigate so the amount of waste in the bottom of the funnel from farming marketers is a huge market problem and the conversational AI agents solve that issue by helping the patients in HCPs engage in meaningful actions that lead directly to a prescribing decision all right. Let’s sit on some definitions because you mentioned a couple of these terms of the difference between chatbots generative AI and conversational AI yeah, so let’s talk talk about chat bots. I think most people have heard of of chatbots and their normal day-to-day lives a lot of consumer companies use chatbots chatbot is a non-sophisticated technology that is generally button-driven. That’s tacked on to a website chatbots are.

[03:38]
Great for a lot of use cases interacting with patients and doctors is not one of them. They’re a one-way Street meaning I can tell how many times a user has clicked on a conversation journey that I have designed for them using buttons but it doesn’t really gather real time intelligence. It’s not a sophisticated user experience and it doesn’t rely on using any natural language that a patient or an HCP would use in conversation next generative AI so all of us have heard about chat GPT generative AI can engage in human-like conversations. It does understand natural language, but it has this nasty tendency to find an answer whether it’s right or wrong and deliver that that’s that’s very dangerous for a Pharma life Science company when interacting with patients or https about medically relevant information you cannot risk hallucination. That’s that is a real danger to.

[04:38]
End that puts you both in the crosshairs of the FDA and legal authorities nobody wants to do that so you need to have some guard rails on that and that’s where conversational AI comes in to play you can engage in human-like conversations it understands natural language. It only provides mlr. Approved responses and it has the ability to escalate any kind of inquiries as as necessary. It’s sophisticated technology all right. That’s some of the reasons that conversational AI is so ideal for farmer brands, but I know with Pharma bridging the gap between the companies and customers is something which is always been a little bit tricky on how does conversational AI help fill that void and what are some of the compliance considerations that are involved? Yeah. I I think compliance is number one right both Pharma marketers legal mlr. Says this cannot go on our website unless we can be 100% certain that any technology is going to provide mlr approved answers and we’ve

[05:38]
Cracked that code we’ve been able to design a technology. That’s scalable in a non scalable world so instead of picking up the phone and calling the 1-800 drug safety number patients are HCPs. Can interact with the agent and get increased at the time of need this operates 24/7 365 meaning that if it’s after hours and I’m an HCP. I’m trying to make my way through all the mychart messages that I got from my patients my drug rep who’s eating dinner with their family doesn’t have to be on I can interact with the agent and get the information that I need at the time of need it’s also a modern way of dealing with customer experience right if we think about it any patient or HCP that was born in the 1980s or later grew up with a cell phone in their hand. They’re used to getting information at the time of need when they want how they want it via a smartphone so I think our old ways of thinking about.

[06:38]
A human must be available someone must be on the other line. That’s not scalable. That’s not repeatable and honestly that’s not the customer experience that HCPs and patients demand today. Can you take us through the journey of a patient who are provider interacting with a brand.com virtual agent? What can it be used for and how does this experience enhance the traditional static website? Yeah, I think what you’re doing is you’re leveraging a modern technology to create the web in the funnel that you need for people that you drive to brand.com so here’s here’s a great example a top three Pharma company understood this this issue. They went out and they built a big beautiful hcp.com for all of their brands. They spent over 20 million dollars doing that. That’s how how big this problem was to them however. They didn’t solve the problem as intellectually curious technologists. We went and tested it out it took 14 clicks to get from that big beautiful hcp.com to a piece of.

[07:38]
Nicole information about an individual brand no Modern HCP or patient is going to go through that to get to that piece of information, so the company still struggles with delivering the actual piece of information needed however lucky for us. We also had an agent deployed on on one of those brand.com and within five key Strokes it brought up the same information doctors will engage with that doctors will be able to get the information. They need to take that prescribing decision and it accelerates the customer experience and the ability for brands to reach their key customers in the time of need all right some of the benefits that farm brands of experienced after implementing conversational AI does the implementation have any impact on call centers for example it absolutely does we’ve seen our agents be able to handle 96% of the inquiries that come into the agent. That’s a huge number right so anytime that someone’s interacting with agent. They’re getting the information.

[08:38]
Nation that they need on the medical information side the Stops the HCPs or the patient from calling the 1-800 number suddenly you become really scalable leveraging technology in a cost effective way because you don’t have to staff your call center as much as you did previously on the brand side now. You have the ability to have these Physicians and patients engage in these types of conversations really driving up high value actions so the ability to download a piece of material engage in a marketing campaign having a patient be able to find a copay card or information about Beyond the pill programs. These are very valuable to Brands and they spend millions of Dollars each year trying to develop these programs, but they’re not able to capture that bottom of the funnel this allows you to do that and get these folks to take the meaningful high value actions that brands are focused on every day.

[09:35]
To that end, let’s talk a little bit about user experience in your mind. What is the average user experience with a brand.com conversational agent? How long are the conversations how satisfied our users and what are some of the recent refinements that have made these so much better. Yeah, so let’s let’s talk about kind of the length of time that they engage with these we see on average at conversation lasting between four and five minutes with agent so that generally means that either a patient or an HCP is engaging in five to six questions if you think about that on the flip side of the coin some of the latest data from iqba says on average a drug rep gets between 90 seconds to two minutes FaceTime with a doctor and an office visit, so that means that hcps are interacting with the agents three to four times that means that there’s meaningful interaction going on additionally what we ask our users to do at the end of a session is rate the session did the material cover what you needed were you able to find the information.

[10:35]
In our agents generally have somewhere between a 4.6 and 4.7 user rating meaning that they are engaging with the agent. They did find the information they needed and your key customers are leaving very satisfied. I think something is really interesting in terms of customer experience and how we’re seeing the shift away from traditional methods to new technological methods ink magazine actually did a study with Fortune 500 companies and they found that companies that were using this in revenue facing functions found that 69% of the folks that interacted with the agents actually preferred the technology over a traditional methods like they call center a click to chat interacting with the website so the data is there this technology works and customers are telling pharmac life Science companies we want to interact with it because it’s an efficient way for us to get our inquiries answered.

[11:35]
You just gave a beautiful segue into the next question let’s talk about first Party data. How is conversational data used to understand customers and what can marketers do with this information here’s here’s the key secret sauce so because conversational AI is a two-way street now brand marketers can live in a real-time data-driven world 24/7 365 where they have the ability to Minds from the conversations. What are the knowledge gaps that they may have in either their marketing promotional or scientific campaigns? What are the types of questions that HCPs or patients are asking that maybe they haven’t thought of what is the natural language that patients are https are using to ask these questions now. You’re starting to get some meaningful intelligence now you can also pair that with data on the back end utilizing some script tags or website data to be able to append.

[12:35]
Secondary data sets right so now I can say hey. What are the demographics of the folks that are interacting with the agent what media channels. Do they go to are they diagnose patients or undiagnosed patients are the HCPs? Who are interacting with the agent on my call list or they not all my call list what other web properties. Do they go to so now. We’ll marketer has really a 360-degree view of their key audiences. They can optimize their top of the funnel and find the right audience in their advertising campaigns. They can adjust on the fly based on either messaging that they’re getting in the agent or the demographic so the folks that are using the agent. It really allows you now a 24/7 365 two-way dialogue with your key customers and using those data sets to be really efficient in your marketing Funnel making sure that you’re hitting the right target audience and there’s no waste in that.

[13:36]
Matt just has been an incredible primer on conversational AI I’d like to end with two kind of wrap-up type questions, what would you say to some of the Skeptics you know people that may still be a little bit on the fence about conversational AI yeah, and I would say first of all like I understand it. You know most most folks had never heard of even generative AI until chat GPT was launched by open AI last November for folks who don’t know open AI as a company is actually been around since 2015. So this is not a necessarily new technology or new line of thinking it just now became commercially available and we have seen it explode you know you can’t walk down the street talk to any of your friends read any newspaper article without hearing the words AI right and it’s it’s really making sense of what that means and how you apply that in the meaningful way, you know we we’ve built agents for over a hundred brands. This is not.

[14:36]
Our first rodeo we know how to do this in an mlr compliant way, I would say the time to do this is now the data is coming out showing that it works that customers prefer a user experience like this. You know I would say that brands that do not find a solution like this will fall quickly behind both in customer experience and top line results for other brands that are leveraging this technology to get ahead alright last question for you Matt is the crystal ball question. How do you see conversational AI evolving and what potential does it hold for further innovation within Healthcare communication and healthcare marketing?

[15:14]
I I think that you will see this as the number one channel for marketing and communication with customers moving forward into the to the future. I would say somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 20% of farmer brands are using a technology like this today. I think you’ll see that explode to maybe 50 to 60 in the next 12 to 18 months and then I think those who don’t adopt this technology will kind of be seen as as laggards in the marketplace. I also think the technology itself both large language models generative AI are going to continue to evolve rapidly in the sophistication of these agents, so you’ll see an even larger gap between this technology and chatbots emerge over the next 12 months. I think that this type of technology is really a marketer’s dream right you’re sitting in a conference room and you know at the head of the therapy.

[16:14]
Area says hey we need to run a data driven brand both in our marketing campaigns our customer experience our martec and omni channel stack I truly believe this is the thread that’s going to tie all of those Investments together and allow those brands that utilize it to be the head of the Pack in orderly at some of the ends of these conversations. I’ll say hey you know let’s check back in in a year or so I think with this we got to check back in maybe next week. So thank you for explaining the basics and also given us a wonderful preview of what’s to come. Let’s do this again soon then awesome. I really look forward to it. Thanks for having me and look forward to chatting again soon terrific for the mmm podcast this is Larry dobrow. Thanks for listening and be well.