CRM Application in Pharmaceutical Enterprise

中图分类号：F270 文献标识：A 文章编号：1009-4202(2011)08-000-02

Abstract Pharmaceutical enterprise competition has become customer relationship competition. Pharmaceutical enterprise should pay more attention to customer relationship management. To avoid the risk of customer loss, the customer relationship needs to be smoothly transited from a sales representative to the enterprise management, which requires enterprise to make clear customer classification, confirm customer information, allocate reasonable resource to customer and keep proper salary incentive to a representative.

Keywords Customer Relationship Management；medical representative pharmaceutical enterprise

In China, medicine industry gradually comes into a surplus economy era. The product competition becomes increasingly fierce so that corporate profit margins declines year by year. Meanwhile, as chemical pharmaceutical industry, it have to deal with the impact of the WTO--the lower margins and the lack of scale advantages and cost advantage will bring some obstacles to the long-term development of the pharmaceutical enterprise. Customer relationship management has become the core of enterprise’s focus and an important research subject.

For customer relationship management research, a lot of literatures and cases that consider whether CRM should be applied in pharmaceutical industry and what advantage CRM will bring to pharmaceutical enterprise are from the view of administrators., but customer data mainly comes from a sales representative, customer management only based on these data. A representative holds the massive customers information, even the customer relationship. Even if enterprises get the information, relationship is still on representative’s hand. The difficulty in CRM application seems particularly outstanding in today's competitive market. How can companies transform customer data management to customer relationship management? This relates to customer classification methods and management on their employees.

Pharmaceutical enterprises classify customer for direct customers (patients) and doctors. According to the "drug administration law" in China, Drugs implements prescription and non-prescription classification management ". In China’s existing pharmaceutical market, prescription drugs rely on a doctor. A pharmaceutical representative promotes medical to hospital and educate doctors by informing the medical’s effectiveness and side effects etc. while commercial company is in charge of sales. OTC products take consumers as the center, consumers determine whether to use, taking the drugs’ price, effectiveness and convenience into consideration when doctors recommend.

Direct customers (patients)

If the drugs have the same quality and effectiveness, Enterprise’s higher reputation by increasing advertisements and its better after-sales service utilizing the network will lead the consumers to choose the OTC drugs. If pharmaceutical enterprise understands customers’ demands as information and timely manage and track the information then the prospects will be more optimistic.

For example, the world's top 500 Johnson & Johnson, a leading health care and pharmaceutical company provides 800 free services hotline, providing the patients very detailed hints and processing method. In addition, J&J CRM resources are mainly from network and sales representatives. J&J enterprise carried out the colorful baby service projects by network and established long-term contact with net-citizen families so that J&J strengthened the relationship between the company and consumers.

Obviously, J&J service the customer while a series of client data also service J&J. J&J can improve their products development and service plans through these information and can formulate more targeted promotion project. These, in turn, will consolidate consumer’s relationship apparently and will form a better customer loyalty. For most Chinese corporations may not have such ability or resource like J&J to develop the network marketing and establish customer loyalty. But, at least in the following aspects they can do something.

1.Through unimpeded network communication, company gets more real information that needs to overcome and strengthen and then takes actions.

pany makes good use of customer data, analyzes customer information effectively and formulates the pertinence product promotion strategy.

Indirect customers (Doctors)

Direct consumers cannot be lost, but more important customer is physicians, most patients still follow the doctor's prescription. Pharmaceutical enterprise analysis the data according to the CRM system and determine the appropriate input to a certain doctor.

Drugs as a special commodity, especially prescription drugs, it has the characteristic that its sales process is completed under the guidance of doctors. 70% consumption of the drug sales generated directly affected by hospital doctors.

Marketing mode of pharmaceutical enterprise is typical of relationship marketing, how to handle and maintain the relationship with hospitals and doctors become the key to the success of pharmaceutical enterprises. To achieve the goal, company can begin from the following points.

(1) check customer data, safeguard enterprise have customer relationships.It is crucial to confirm customer information by someone who can be superiors or managers, which can greatly reduce the risk of representatives’ job-hopping.

(2)allocate resources, maintain the customer relationship.Doctors will remember the enterprise not the representative by allocating resources to enterprise name From the CRM point of view, different resources put into different customers based on customer classification, which will make largest profit.

(3)keep sales talents, retain customer relations.To achieve the interaction and win-win situation between enterprise and sales staff and to reduce the frequent loss of sales, maintaining the balance between pressure and inventiveness and establishing a suitable salary system are particularly important.

Conclusion: The difficulty of solving customer relationship management in the pharmaceutical company appeal the enterprises to find the direct and indirect customers and their demands, to find dynamic changes of the factors that affect sales, and to find the relationship between the key data and the key customers. Through the pharmaceutical enterprises and their representatives’ efforts, more competitive products and more value can be created.