Social media is a tool that is becoming increasingly more important within the Healthcare and Life Sciences industry. Social collaboration works with the line of business, speeds employee engagement and fosters innovation. Within customer relationship management systems (CRMs), there are many features that enable a workforce to be social and collaborate, however there are always compliance concerns surrounding what employees will say within a CRM system that could potentially cause harm to the company in terms of regulatory violations and fines. Pharma, Biotech, and Medical Device companies commonly choose to enforce a dropdown approach which prevents free text from being entered into a CRM, however dropdowns provide a false sense of comfort for compliance. Just because an employee can’t enter information into a CRM system, that doesn’t mean the comment or note isn’t being recorded via another medium that is out of sight of compliance. There are many reasons social CRMs are actually much less risky than dropdowns:
- Dropdowns cause employees to take compliance risk offline: If employees are not enabled to use the social fields within a CRM such as call notes, they are most likely taking their conversations offline and communicating via email or another medium. By communicating via other mediums, conversations between employees as well as conversations that employees have with their customers are no longer easily visible by the company and therefore, compliance risk is much harder to observe and remediate. Compliance issues are bound to arise regardless of whether the social aspects of a CRM are enabled, so it is best for a company to realize these issues in real-time and have the ability to act immediately before a crisis emerges.
- Employees can better retain information from meetings, visits, and phone calls: Forcing employees to put their call notes into a CRM system via dropdowns almost defeats the entire purpose of call notes. Many employees are constantly interacting and engaging with stakeholders from a variety of different companies and it can be difficult to keep them all straight overtime. A dropdown can cause five very different conversations to all look the same within a CRM system which is not beneficial for those attempting to build lasting relationships. Call notes are meant to contain specific information about companies, stakeholders, and conversations which will allow employees to re-engage with customers at the drop of a hat.
- Increase efficiency through crowdsourcing of internal questions and discussions: Relying heavily on a medium such as e-mail can cause employees to answer the same questions over and over again on an individual basis. Within a social CRM, questions are readily available for viewing by all employees and discussions can be started on less straight-forward topics. Having this information readily available in one centralized location will free-up the time employees and executives spend answering repetitive questions over and over again thus increasing employee efficiency.
Companies must start to adopt and become proficient in collaboration via social platforms because that is where health care professional and patients are communicating. The benefits of a social CRM far outweigh the compliance concerns due to the availability of compliance monitoring and archiving solutions. A compliance solution will ensure all communications are being monitored and compliance risks are caught and remediated in real-time. Social CRMs are the path forward for Healthcare and Life Sciences companies, it is time leave the dropdowns behind and leverage all the benefits a social CRM has to offer.