Advice You - Business

Customer service is increasingly seen as one of the most valuable uses for a commercial World Wide Web site. Your Web site is available on a 24 hour, seven days a week basis. So it is well worth exploring ways in which yo

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

ur customers can virtually “serve themselves," without the need for overtime staff, or lengthy voice mail procedures.

James Feldman is President of JFA, Inc., an online business offering high quality and unique gift item

; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

s including automatic watch winders, Grundig shortwave pocket radios, and nitroglycerine pill fobs. The JFA Web site has been online since 1997, and has doubled its income every year - it’s now a multi-million dollar e-com

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

merce enterprise.

Jim, who's also a professional speaker and expert on customer service, highlighted for me how the online buying experience differs from the bricks-and-mortar model.

Buying online eliminates the physi

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

cal presence and personality of the salesperson from the process. This makes the Web site copy critical in creating a one-to-one relationship with the customer or prospect.

Which echoes one of my favorite mantras:

Ev

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

ery page of your site should be written from the visitor’s point of view, not yours.

A visitor should be able to look at your offerings, and immediately answer the questions:

“Why me?” - that is, is your Web site the

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

right place for me?
“Why should I care?” - does this copy convince me that you can meet my needs?

It’s much easier and immediate to jump from Web site to Web site than to move between real-world stores. So the visito

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

r has far more freedom of choice online. Jim says that the challenge for customer service is therefore very clearly to focus on one customer, one purchase at a time. E-customers expect great service, with little or no dir

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

ect interaction. They will tolerate some mistakes, but not many.

Jim offers five rules for effective online customer service:

1. Be accessible. Show very clearly on your site all the ways that your customer can con

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

tact you - including e-mail, phone and fax numbers, and your office hours.

And, if it’s practical for your business, be personal - give your visitors a real person to call who has a name, as opposed to sales@mycompany.co

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

m

Of course, if you’re really upscale, you can include a “Call-me” button on your site.

2. Return every e-mail or phone call in the same day, as far as reasonably possible. This may sound simplistic, but a recen

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

t experiment with the top Fortune 100 companies showed that nearly a third failed to respond to e-mail sent through their Web site within one month! Some of these companies still don’t provide a usable e-mail address on th

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

eir sites at all.

3. Acknowledge all orders. Send e-mail confirmations (this can be done very effectively with autoresponders), and if you’re shipping actual products, give tracking numbers and expected delivery dates.

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

4. Provide a clear return policy, honor it and learn from it. This may give you more information about what’s working and what’s not. Jim’s products are sometimes returned with no explanation, so his staff always cal

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

l the customer to establish and resolve the problem.

5. Expect more phone calls. Jim says: “Customers can’t read or write!” If your Web site traffic and response rates grow (which is, of course, what we want), so wil

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

l the volume of phone calls, whatever your business or industry.

Regardless of the site quality, clear returns and privacy policies, secure servers, etc., people still require human interaction. All of my clients report

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

talking to customers on the phone, and walking them through the Web site, where their questions are clearly answered. Maybe these psychological barriers will lessen, but right now, they are very much there.

If you can

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

get the customer service aspects of your business working well, there’ll be a definite bottom line impact. Jim is quite clear that his business has grown substantially through repeat business and referrals from satisfied c

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

ustomers.

And in contrast, we can see the impact of poor customer service and fulfillment procedures in many of the dot.coms that failed. Jim says that people buy things online in the expectation of getting something mo

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

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Adding Value is easy, often fun, usually free, and always worth the extra thought.

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