Better user experience on pharma community CPhi with data-based enhancements

Visitors to your platform want to be served optimally and provide the best experience. Data is the key to this success, but how do you collect it and gain insights from it? And how do you translate this into appropriate improvements? CPhI, a platform that focuses on the pharmaceutical industry, previously focused only on physical events. Now, the ambition is to offer customers a year-round online experience, in addition to the physical events. CPhI turned to Cmotions for the necessary knowledge and expertise to improve the online user experience of platform visitors and partners based on data.

Realizing ambitions

CPhI is a platform dedicated to bringing together professionals and expertise within the pharmaceutical industry. CPhI is part of Informa Markets, a global leader in event hosting and publishing. CPhI’s platform brings together products, professionals, knowledge and solutions. The organization wants to create as much added value as possible for visitors and partners. A major optimization was needed.

“Worldwide, we want to become the largest knowledge and network platform within the pharmaceutical industry,” says Patrick Steenvoorden, digital director at CPhI.

“An ambitious goal. To achieve this, it is important that we add value for both visitors and partners when it comes to finding a new supplier and entering into new partnerships. For this, it is important that we offer more personalized and better experiences.”

From data analysis to recommendations

A lot of data is available to improve the visitor experience of the platform. CPhI was looking for a specialist who knows everything about visitors, algorithms, data and user experience.

“Our own data scientists mainly look at data with technical glasses,” Patrick explains.

“To achieve our goals, we were looking for a data scientist who works from a business perspective. Cmotions has this knowledge and skill. It’s nice to have a partner who not only does the right data analysis, but also knows how to translate this into appropriate recommendations for the platform.”

The first step within the project consisted of an analysis of the data quality.

“We knew we had a lot of data, but had no idea what the quality of it was,” Patrick explains.

“Cmotions dove into that. For example, the team examined what data is available and whether the data is complete enough and up-to-date. We received the results of the analysis in an extensive report. This is full of findings, conclusions and recommendations in terms of completeness, timeliness and availability of key data sources. This is very valuable to us because it helps us to make improvements. One of those improvements is to supplement company and product information as a key feature in the CRM strategy. Indeed, a complete company profile turns out to be an important driver of visits and conversion.”

Personalized content

The next step was to interpret data and develop a segmentation model for CPhI’s visitors and partners based on search, click and transaction behavior, among other things. This defines types of visitors and identifies which groups visit which company and/or product pages.

“The visitor segmentation is a nice basis for us to work from,” says Patrick.

“With this we know exactly which types of companies we can best target within certain categories. In the future, we can specify this even further by zooming in on region, country or product category, for example.”

Improve visitor experience

The analysis of data quality and visitor segmentation form the basis for Cmotions to make concrete recommendations for improving the customer experience on CPhI’s platform. To do this, Cmotions dived into the algorithms, but also looked at the UX (user experience) of the platform.

“The team at Cmotions has been collaborating on product improvements with more personalized recommendations,” says Patrick.

“This has already led to improvements in the first four-week period. The number of pages visited and session duration increased by showing more relevant content.”