Chatbots - A blind spot of the pharma industry?

As you know, we are always looking for the latest solutions with added value for our partners and for the excipient industry in general. For quite some time now, more and more companies in other industries have been using a chatbot very successfully.

As a result, we took a closer look at the pharmaceutical industry in general and the excipient industry in particular and found out that more than 95% of the companies do not offer any direct live-chat on their website at all, let alone an automated chatbot! Even a simple contact form or a contact email is usually rather difficult to find on the homepage. And, as many of you know anyway, is only moderately accepted by users.

Yes, it probably works for your company quite a while with your current solution, so…

What are the gains when using a chatbot as a pharma company?

Increase sales, reduce costs, save time & automate your support!
Chatbots automate workflows in the backend. Moreover, they are an extension to your sales and support teams.
A chatbot doesn’t get tired or is having free days, it is working 24/7, 365 days a year. No matter when users visit your website, the bot is always there to meet & help them.
61% of consumers feel that having Chatbots in customer service is the way of the future.
Nearly 50% of consumers already engage in automated conversations with Chatbots.
80% of organizations call artificial intelligence “important”.
61% have plans to incorporate (or continue incorporating) AI into their customer experience.

How can chatbots help a company in the excipient industry?

Chatbots are expected to trim business costs by more than $8 billion per year by 2022.
29% of customer service positions in the US could be automated through Chatbots and other currently available technology.
Researchers predict that within the next five years, between 75 and 90% of queries will be dealt with by Chatbots, with cost savings of up to $0.70 per interaction.
In general, around 32% of common questions are instantly solved (no more frustrated service employees because of standard requests) and 45% improvement in customer response time.
You can automatically qualify leads with your (Lead-)chatbot, including GDPR conformity
Help you utilize otherwise unused opportunities (f.e. generate new customers, who wouldn’t get in touch with you otherwise)

We have seen that chatbots in general can enlarge your service. We found one company in the excipient industry using live-chat: Abitec. And there is one company using a chatbot: BIOGRUND.

We took the chance to interview the marketing responsible of Biogrund, Rüdiger Dartsch to the background and the advantages of their use of the chatbot.

Interview:

Why Biogrund is using a chatbot?

Rüdiger Dartsch: Biogrund is always looking for the latest and best solutions, on the one hand for our products, and on the other hand of course for our customer service. We tried the chatbot as a general contact channel for our customers, especially if inquiries come in outside our business hours. The chatbot handles sample requests and orders, classic FAQ questions or shares information about our products. For more complex topics, an employee can take over the chat. Outside of our business hours the customer can very easily submit a request through the bot.

What were the biggest obstacles in creating & implementing the bot?

Rüdiger Dartsch: Honestly, the GDPR was the biggest issue. Our data protection officer rejected two solutions as not GDPR compliant. However, this issue was resolved by getting the bot platform right. Normally, you would think content selection would be a big problem. But since the bot is created with the most common customer questions, information requests, and the details to your products, and these are all well known, content selection is straightforward.

You guys have been using the bot for a while now, what is your experience? Are there any surprises?

Rüdiger Dartsch: Many users who normally just look at the page interact with the chatbot and they stay longer on our website. We have also noticed a significant increase in orders, leads and inquiries. Especially from countries where we have no representation or outside our business hours.

That sounds extremely interesting! Can you quantify that for us a little bit? By how much have the inquiries, orders etc. increased?

Rüdiger Dartsch: We are pleased with the number of leads we are generating through the chatbot. The monthly enquiries go up into the 2-digit range from time to time. Here we see that non-European countries like to use the chatbot to contact us. Let’s hope that we Europeans will also increasingly use chatbots in the future and recognise their service and added value.

Thank you very much!