Customer Engagement Score for Pharma | Framework

Somewhere in almost every pharmaceutical company, there's a slide about customer engagement scoring. It appears in digital transformation decks, omnichannel strategy presentations, and CRM roadmaps. It usually features a neat pyramid or four-quadrant matrix with labels like "Aware," "Engaged," "Committed," and "Advocate." It looks strategic. It looks data-driven. And in most companies, it's fiction — a conceptual framework that nobody has actually operationalised into a usable decision tool.

The idea of scoring customer engagement is sound. In a world where pharmaceutical companies interact with HCPs across dozens of touchpoints — rep visits, emails, webinars, congresses, portal content, MSL meetings, sampling, speaker programmes — you need a way to synthesise all that activity into something actionable. The question "how engaged is this physician with our brand?" is a legitimate strategic question. The problem is that most attempts to answer it produce a number that nobody trusts, nobody uses, and nobody can explain.

This article is a practical guide to building a Customer Engagement Score that actually works in pharma. Not a theoretical framework. Not a technology evaluation. A scoring methodology that produces numbers your commercial, medical, and digital teams will trust — and act on.

What a CES Should Actually Do

Before building anything, you need to be clear about what "engagement scoring" is for. Most implementations fail because they try to answer the wrong question. Here's what a useful CES should answer:

Question 1: How engaged is this customer? Not "how many times have they interacted" — that's activity, not engagement. How deeply, how broadly, how recently, and in what direction? A physician who attended one advisory board and had a deep scientific exchange with your MSL is more meaningfully engaged than one who opened 47 emails. Your score needs to reflect that.

Question 2: What does their engagement pattern predict? Is this engagement trajectory likely to lead to behaviour change — prescribing adoption, formulary recommendation, clinical protocol integration, peer advocacy? Or is this simply a naturally curious clinician who consumes content from every company equally and never changes practice?

Question 3: What should we do next? Given this customer's engagement level, trajectory, and pattern, what's the optimal next action? More content? A rep visit? An MSL engagement? An invitation to an advisory board? Nothing at all?

If your CES can answer all three questions, it's a decision tool. If it can only answer the first, it's a reporting metric — and reporting metrics, in my experience, get reviewed in quarterly business reviews and ignored the other 89 days of the quarter.

The Four Dimensions of Engagement

Most engagement scores are one-dimensional — they count interactions and sum them up. This is like measuring someone's fitness by counting how many times they enter a gym without tracking what they did inside. A credible CES captures four distinct dimensions, each of which tells you something different about the customer relationship.

Dimension 1: Engagement Depth

Not all interactions are created equal. An email open is a micro-interaction that may reflect nothing more than a subject line that triggered curiosity. A webinar attendance represents 30-60 minutes of deliberate time investment. An advisory board participation represents a full day of engagement, a professional endorsement of your brand, and a willingness to be publicly associated with your science.

Your scoring model needs a hierarchy of interaction significance. I typically use four tiers:

Passive engagement: Email opens, webpage views, social media impressions, banner ad exposures. These are awareness signals. They confirm the customer has encountered your brand but reveal nothing about intent. Score them low — they're the foundation of the pyramid but they're not very informative on their own.

Active engagement: Content downloads, webinar attendance, portal logins, sample requests, event registrations. These require deliberate action — the customer chose to engage. Score them moderately — they signal genuine interest but not necessarily commercial intent.

Interactive engagement: Rep meetings (especially customer-initiated), MSL scientific exchanges, medical information requests, advisory board participation, clinical trial involvement. These are high-investment interactions that require significant time commitment and often indicate professional engagement with your therapeutic area. Score them highly — they're the strongest behavioural signals you have.

Advocacy: Speaking at your company-sponsored events, publishing case reports featuring your product, peer-to-peer recommendations captured through speaker programme feedback, KOL activities. These represent the highest form of engagement — the customer is actively promoting your brand to their peers. Score them highest.

The specific weights assigned to each tier should not be determined by committee consensus. They should be calibrated against outcomes data. Which interaction types are most predictive of prescribing behaviour? Which ones are most associated with formulary advocacy? If you don't have outcomes data yet (and most companies starting a CES programme don't), start with expert-informed weights and plan to recalibrate once you have 6-12 months of correlated data.

Dimension 2: Engagement Breadth

A customer who interacts with you across four channels — email, field force, webinars, and congress — is qualitatively different from a customer who only interacts via email, even if the total number of interactions is identical. Multi-channel engagement is one of the strongest signals of genuine relationship depth, because it indicates that the customer values your brand across different contexts and information needs.

Measuring breadth is straightforward: count the number of distinct channels through which the customer has engaged within a defined time window. But the insight it provides is strategically important. Customers with high breadth scores are typically your most valuable relationships — and they're the ones most at risk of competitive displacement, because they're paying attention to the category broadly, not just to you.

Dimension 3: Engagement Recency

A customer who was highly engaged last year but hasn't interacted in six months is not the same as a customer who is highly engaged right now. Your CES needs to reflect this, and the standard approach is time-decay weighting.

The implementation is simple: interactions from the past 30 days receive full weight, interactions from 30-90 days receive reduced weight (typically 70-80% of full), interactions from 90-180 days receive further reduction (40-50%), and interactions older than 180 days receive minimal weight or are excluded entirely. The specific decay curve should be calibrated to your commercial cycle — in a fast-moving therapeutic area with frequent prescribing decisions, a steeper decay is appropriate. In an area with annual formulary reviews, a longer memory is warranted.

Recency weighting prevents a common problem with engagement scores: historical inflation. Without time decay, a customer who was intensely engaged two years ago during a clinical trial but has since disengaged completely would still show a high score. This is worse than useless — it's actively misleading, because your commercial team might treat a lapsed relationship as an active one.

Dimension 4: Engagement Trajectory

Is engagement increasing, stable, or declining? This is the most underused dimension and arguably the most strategically valuable. The absolute engagement level tells you where the relationship is. The trajectory tells you where it's going.

A customer moving from low to moderate engagement is a growth opportunity — they're warming up, and the right next action could accelerate the trajectory. A customer moving from high to moderate engagement is a retention risk — something has changed, and you need to understand why before the relationship deteriorates further. A customer with stable high engagement is your core — they're committed and consistent, and your job is to maintain and deepen the relationship.

Calculating trajectory is straightforward: compare the current period's engagement score to the previous period's. But acting on trajectory requires segmentation logic that most CRM systems don't natively support. You need to trigger different next-best-actions based not just on the score level, but on the score direction.

Building the Score: A Practical Methodology

Step 1: Map Your Data Sources

Before you build anything, audit every customer touchpoint across your organisation. This is more complex than it sounds, because different functions own different interaction data.

Commercial owns: rep visit data (Veeva CRM), email engagement (marketing automation), event attendance, sample requests. Medical affairs owns: MSL interaction data, medical information requests, advisory board participation, clinical trial engagement. Digital owns: website analytics, portal usage, webinar platform data, app engagement. Market access may own: formulary committee interactions, payer meetings.

The data audit will inevitably reveal gaps and inconsistencies. Field force interactions may be inconsistently logged. Medical affairs interactions may live in a separate system with no CRM integration. Digital engagement may be tracked at the cookie level rather than the individual level. Congress interactions may be captured on paper forms that never get digitised.

You do not need to solve all of these data quality issues before building your CES. You need to be honest about which data sources are reliable, which are partial, and which are missing entirely. Build your initial score using the reliable sources and plan a data integration roadmap for the rest. A score built on 70% of available data is infinitely more useful than waiting three years for perfect data integration before building anything.

Step 2: Normalise and Weight

Different interaction types are measured in different units — binary (attended/didn't attend), count (number of email opens), duration (minutes of webinar attendance), or qualitative (rep-assessed meeting quality). You need to normalise these to a common scale before combining them.

The approach I recommend: convert each interaction type to a 0-100 scale within its tier, then apply tier weights. So within the "active engagement" tier, the highest possible webinar attendance in your dataset = 100, zero = 0, and everything else is linearly scaled between them. Then the tier itself is weighted according to its significance — passive might carry 10% of the total score, active 25%, interactive 40%, advocacy 25%.

Initial weights should be set based on expert judgement informed by whatever outcomes data you have. After 6-12 months, recalibrate using correlation analysis: which interaction types are most strongly correlated with prescribing behaviour or other business outcomes? Adjust weights accordingly. Plan to recalibrate annually — the significance of different channels shifts over time as your marketing mix evolves.

Step 3: Composite Scoring

Combine your four dimensions into a composite score. The simplest approach is a weighted average: depth (40%) + breadth (20%) + recency (20%) + trajectory (20%). But the right weights depend on your strategic priorities.

If you're in launch phase, recency and trajectory matter more than historical depth — you want to identify which HCPs are engaging now, not which ones engaged last year. Weight recency and trajectory more heavily. If you're in a mature market defending share, depth and breadth matter more — you want to identify your strongest relationships and protect them. Weight those dimensions more heavily.

Step 4: Segment and Act

A score without segmentation is a number. A score with segmentation is a strategy. Divide your scored customer base into actionable segments — typically four to six — with a clear next-best-action for each.

The segmentation I find most useful:

Nurture (low score, stable or increasing trajectory): These HCPs have minimal engagement but are either new to your brand or beginning to pay attention. Next action: broad-reach, low-cost digital engagement — educational content, peer-reviewed evidence, awareness building. Don't deploy expensive field force resources here yet.

Engage (moderate score, increasing trajectory): These HCPs are warming up and responding to your outreach. This is where your investment yields the highest marginal return. Next action: targeted rep visits, webinar invitations, deeper clinical content, potential MSL engagement for scientific questions.

Deepen (high score, stable trajectory): These are your engaged customers. They know your brand, they're interacting regularly, and they're likely prescribers. Next action: higher-value interactions — advisory board invitations, speaker programme recruitment, peer-to-peer programme involvement, exclusive content or data previews.

Protect (high score, declining trajectory): This is your most urgent segment. These were engaged customers who are pulling away. Something has changed — competitive activity, clinical experience, organisational factors — and you need to understand what. Next action: diagnostic outreach. A rep visit focused on listening, not selling. An MSL conversation to understand if there are scientific concerns. Protect segments deserve immediate attention because re-engaging a declining relationship is far cheaper than rebuilding a lost one.

Advocate (very high score, stable or increasing): Your champions. They're not just engaged — they're actively promoting your brand. Next action: amplification. Give them platforms (speaking opportunities, publication support), recognition (advisory board membership, early data access), and exclusive relationships (named medical liaison, direct access to your clinical team).

The Pitfalls That Kill Most CES Programmes

Overweighting Digital Because It's Easy to Measure

Digital interactions are abundant and automatically captured. Field force interactions are less frequent and manually logged. The temptation is to overweight digital because the data is better. Resist this. In pharma, high-touch interactions — rep visits, MSL discussions, advisory board participation — are consistently more influential than digital touchpoints. A CES that overweights digital will systematically misdirect your commercial resources towards HCPs who browse your website while ignoring HCPs who have deep scientific conversations with your field team but never open emails.

Ignoring Medical Affairs Data

In many pharma companies, medical affairs interaction data lives in a separate system from commercial CRM data, and the two are never connected. This is a strategic blind spot. MSL visits, medical information requests, and clinical trial involvement are some of the most meaningful engagement signals in pharma — they indicate a level of scientific engagement that transcends marketing influence. A CES that ignores medical affairs data is seeing half the picture.

Building for Reporting Instead of Action

If your CES appears in a quarterly business review dashboard but doesn't trigger any operational action, it's an expensive reporting exercise. Every segment should have a clear, operationalised next-best-action that your commercial, medical, and digital teams know how to execute. If you can't connect the score to an action, the score is academic.

Setting Weights by Committee Instead of Data

I mentioned this earlier but it's worth repeating because it's the single most common mistake. Engagement weights decided in a workshop by brand managers reflect what the brand team thinks is important, not what actually predicts outcomes. Calibrate against data. If you don't have data yet, start with informed assumptions but commit to recalibrating within 12 months.

Treating the Score as Permanent

Engagement patterns change. Channels evolve. Your marketing mix shifts. A CES built in 2024 and never recalibrated is outdated by 2026. Plan for annual weight recalibration, quarterly data quality audits, and ongoing validation against business outcomes. The CES is a living tool, not a one-time project.

The Strategic Value of Getting This Right

When a CES programme works — when it produces scores that teams trust, segments that make sense, and next-best-actions that drive results — the strategic impact is transformative. You move from "spray and pray" engagement (send everything to everyone and hope something lands) to precision engagement (invest the right resources in the right customers at the right time through the right channel). You can quantify the relationship between engagement investment and business outcomes. You can identify at-risk customers before they defect. You can measure the effectiveness of specific campaigns and programmes by their impact on engagement trajectory rather than vanity metrics.

Most importantly, a credible CES gives your organisation a shared language for discussing customer relationships. When commercial, medical, and digital teams are all looking at the same score, discussing the same segments, and optimising towards the same customer outcomes, you have genuine omnichannel alignment — not just omnichannel technology.

That's the goal. The score is just the mechanism.

If you're building or fixing a customer engagement score, let's discuss your measurement strategy.