This is Part 4 of the ‘Succeeding in Value Communication’ series, a set of articles that examine the key success factors in creating customer engagement tools that successfully communicate the clinical and economic benefits of pharmaceuticals, devices and diagnostics. These recommendations have been drawn from the experiences of the BaseCase Consulting Team.
Never stop testing & evaluating your app
There are many famous examples of products that have been launched without being effectively tested or evaluated. And it’s widely known that testing products in the marketplace before commercializing them increases your chances of success. The same rule also applies to customer engagement tools: they have to be tested in the real world before a full-scale launch.
If the Key Value Message isn’t communicated clearly, it could be that distracting and unnecessary information is diminishing the impact. It’s important you get to the bottom of any potential issues before a full-scale launch, and Testing & Evaluation is often the best way to get this information. Consider questions such as:
- What information has to be included in the value story?
- How long does it take to present the story?
- Is there anything affecting the flow of the story?
Internal Testing
When developing your value story, it’s important to involve internal stakeholders early in the process. This helps to ensure resulting tools are aligned with the needs of the intended end-users. Ideally, they would be included at the sketching or implementation stages.
The objective here is to be certain that end-users are comfortable with using the tool during presentations. If they’re not, it simply won’t be used. To address this, it is common for our clients to undertake a ‘beta testing’ phase. Here, they’ll roll out a final draft of their presentation to only a few users and get them to provide regular feedback and input on how it can be optimized.
External Testing
After internal testing, external testing is where the presentation is piloted with a small number of ‘friendly customers’. This is a powerful form of testing as it provides real market insight into how the presentation will be understood and received by audiences, and that messaging is both relevant and credible. It creates confidence that the launch version is as close to perfection as possible.
The BaseCase Platform is uniquely positioned here due to its flexible nature. The online editor allows authorized users to instantly respond to feedback by modifying the presentation and adding or removing parts of the value story. This removes the need to hire software developers and go through lengthy outsourcing processes.
Data Capture & Insights
With BaseCase Data Capture and BaseCase Insights, the testing & evaluation phase never really ends. These products give managers and analysts ongoing, real-time usage and feedback data to help inform decisions on value communication. Insights provides valuable usage data on an app-by-app basis, using heat maps to show which elements are proving to be the most popular. While Data Capture allows you to better understand your customers, field teams/KAMs, and your market with in-app surveys and live feedback.
Such qualitative and quantitative data allows you and your team to make informed decisions on presentation updates and design, meaning the value story is consistently up-to-date and refined to meet the current needs of customers.
This further relieves the burden on KAMs and field teams to get it right first time. There is little danger of cluttering the value story with low-impact elements that are only there because they might be useful at some stage. And if elements have been left out that turn out to be crucial, updating BaseCase content is as easy as revising a PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet. Updates are also made instantly across user accounts, so end-users are always equipped with the latest, tried, and tested version.