Getting consumer trust in pharmaceutical business is a big step in seeing sustainable success. Pharmaceutical companies have an even bigger challenge in building trust, given the general sentiment towards businesses in this industry. Only 46% of adults trust pharma companies – and that statistic is solely for the companies they already know and take medications from.
Nobody’s done a recent survey to find the nationwide or global thoughts on all pharma companies, including those that a consumer has never heard of, but it’s safe to assume the figure will be even lower.
What you can take from this is that consumers will trust a pharma company after getting to know them and becoming familiar with the brand. Ironically, this makes it harder to build consumer trust in pharmaceutical business as they’re less likely to trust you initially. You must take steps to gain their trust and establish a credible reputation within this industry – and here’s how you do that.
3 steps to build consumer trust in pharmaceutical business
1. Make Customer Service A Priority
Think about your target market: you’re selling medical products to people in need of help. Many of your customers will be elderly individuals or people with chronic health conditions. When they need help, you need to be there right away to give them as much assistance as possible.
Furthermore, consider the industry you’re in: pharma companies deal with complicated drugs with various side effects, etc. It’s a sector that’s prone to customer inquiries – people will always contact you to ask about your products. You need to answer these questions in a timely manner, and with as much detail as you can muster.
Both of these points highlight the importance of pharma CRM solutions for your business. Invest in a good CRM to give you all the tools required for handling customers and providing the best level of customer service possible. The right CRM will help you:
- View all customer inquiries in one place
- Connect customer queries with customer profiles
- Filter inquiries to the right customer service departments
- Receive notifications so you never miss an interaction
- And so much more!
When customer service is a priority for your business, the customer ends up benefiting. From the outside, you build trust with consumers because people are happy with how you treat them. It’s especially important during the customer acquisition stage when you receive loads of questions from consumers who might be interested in what you sell.
2. Always Be Transparent
Again, this is one of those things that every business can apply to itself, yet it takes on an even bigger meaning for a pharma company. The easiest way to lose trust with consumers is by misrepresenting the products you sell them.
For consumer trust in pharmaceutical business, this could involve:
- Not labeling things properly: Your products need to include all the ingredients on the label, along with possible side effects, how to take the product, and much more. Missing anything from a label can lose trust from consumers (and land you in legal trouble).
- Making false claims: There are loads of examples of big pharma companies making false claims about their products. Johnson & Johnson is arguably the biggest brand to do this – and it paid over $2 billion in damages. You can’t claim that your drugs will do things unless they’re approved for that treatment. For instance, don’t say that customers can take a pain relief medication as a sleep aid unless the FDA approves it for that purpose.
- Hiding the truth: Your medication/drugs will have side effects, and there’s no getting around that. So, be upfront about this instead of hiding it in small print. Make the side effects known and make a big deal out of them to show you’re being transparent. Hiding the truth makes you look like a shady company without an interest in the common man.
- Providing no evidence: As a pharma company, you’ll run tests on medication to see if they work. If you sell medication from other brands, you still need to know what tests were run. More important, you should provide this evidence to the consumer and make it accessible. People should visit your website’s product pages and see links to clinical trials and studies involving your medication. Use this as evidence to back up any claims – and it also adds credibility to your products.
A lack of transparency will result in a failed business, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. People will figure things out eventually, so you need to be open and honest about everything from the beginning.
3. Uphold The Highest Quality Standards
The last thing we’re going to talk about is upholding the highest quality standards. You need to prove to consumers that your products are trustworthy – and quality is one of the biggest seals of approval.
You should do three main things to prove this to people, and we’ve already mentioned one of them already:
- Show all of your testing: Providing accessible evidence doesn’t just improve transparency, but it also shows that you maintain very high-quality standards. If people see that your products have been tested multiple times on various groups (and presented genuinely beneficial results), then they’re infinitely more likely to trust your pharma business.
- Always maintain compliance: You can’t hope to run a successful business in this industry without maintaining regulatory compliance. The exact regulators you deal with will depend on the countries you sell your products in. Nevertheless, make sure your products get the correct approval so you can brandish certificates and badges.
- Produce consistent products: Imagine if you sold medication that looked like small white circular pills in one batch, then red triangular ones in another. It looks extremely unprofessional, and nobody will trust the products. You need to create a consistent manufacturing process that lets you produce the same items time after time. Consistency is a mark of credibility, and consumers will trust you more.
Look, you need to build consumer trust in pharmaceutical business, or it will never get off the ground. People only trust pharma companies after they’ve used them, but these ideas will help you draw in consumers and make them believe in your business.
