How global healthcare leader Sanofi uses Twilio Segment to build golden profiles, increase omni-channel engagement, and improve patient outcomes

Results

The big win

Sanofi, one of the world's largest healthcare companies, needed a real-time, 360-degree view of its healthcare providers (HCPs) to better understand both the online and offline customer journey. With this data, Sanofi hoped to provide more targeted, personalized experiences for HCPs and positively impact patient outcomes.

Sanofi turned to Twilio Segment to build “golden profiles” of its customers, using Profiles Sync to combine customer data from multiple sources in their Snowflake data cloud. With this more complete, relevant view of customers’ interests and behaviors, Sanofi was able to create complex, omni-channel marketing campaigns that better educate healthcare providers about new drugs and treatment plans.

Sanofi, a leading global healthcare company, provides life-changing treatments, medications and vaccines to millions around the world. Fueled by data and digital technologies, cutting-edge science and manufacturing, Sanofi aims to transform the practice of medicine through the creation of innovative treatments for patients across the healthcare spectrum. Sanofi helps healthcare providers (HCPs) such as doctors, hospitals, and pharmacists provide the best possible care to patients by continually educating them on medications that fit patients’ specific needs.

Sales representatives at Sanofi have regular on-site contact with HCPs, but Sanofi struggled to capture customers' digital interactions on their website and other online channels. This created gaps in Sanofi’s understanding of the entire customer journey and missed opportunities to connect online and offline customer touch points. Sanofi couldn’t optimize distribution of information to customers about new medications and treatment plans because It lacked the 360-degree customer view it needed to enable personalized customer communications. 

To provide better experiences for its HCP customers, Sanofi set out to collect its own first-party data and build accurate, real-time customer profiles that could power digital-first engagement and personalization. Initially, Sanofi considered building its own data solution and ecosystem but ultimately decided it would be inefficient to recreate a solution that already existed. 

Sanofi turned to Twilio Segment’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) to help launch OneView: golden profiles, built using online and offline customer data from multiple sources, that could be used to build targeted, omni-channel marketing campaigns. With OneView, Sanofi is able to better educate HCPs on medications and treatments, improving the customer experience and patient outcomes. Ultimately, the decision to “buy vs build” with Segment enabled Sanofi to take ownership of its first-party data and accelerate the implementation. 

With Twilio Segment, Sanofi can: 

• Collect and centralize data from multiple sources and activate it immediately, enabling better engagement with healthcare professionals.

• Synthesize raw data into real-time, identity-resolved customer profiles

• Deliver complete customer profiles to the warehouse with Profiles Sync, enabling profile enrichment and valuable audience insights

• Use Reverse ETL to easily send profile data back out of the warehouse to any tool in their tech stack for laser-focused targeting and personalization

• Improve healthcare providers’ understanding of new therapeutic areas , leading to better experiences for both doctors and patients

Solving for disparate data and manual processes with a real-time, event-driven model 

The healthcare industry moves quickly and HCPs are busier than ever. There are tens-of-thousands of drugs on the market, with new medications becoming available on a regular basis, making it difficult for HCPs to stay up to date with treatment options. To keep up with this continuously evolving environment, Sanofi needed to develop a way to fully understand its customers, across channels and in real time, and the ability to more efficiently educate them about symptoms and treatment options. 

While its sales representatives were utilizing a CRM solution to track data from in-person interactions with HCPs, Sanofi’s team had an incomplete customer view, missing digital a number of touch points like website interactions. 

In addition to needing a better solution for creating customer profiles, Sanofi aimed to achieve building a trusted internal id graph in their warehouse. Prior to Segment, Sanofi used ETL and batch processing to build profiles. However, this system didn’t deliver real-time results. Traditional ETL requires piping data into a warehouse, loading it, then using it. By the time that data is sent downstream, it’s often stale. To provide timely, relevant information to HCPs, Sanofi needed a solution that could keep up with the fast-paced healthcare environment so that they could send content to doctors when it was most relevant to them. As a result, patients can receive reliable treatments and improve their health conditions at a quicker rate. 

With Segment, Sanofi moved to a real-time, event-driven model that enables its teams to access customer data immediately. Before Segment, it took three-plus days to activate customer data; now Sanofi is activating data in under three hours, a 95% increase in efficiency.“Previously, we would work with our data by moving it, then using it. Now, with Segment, we can use data while we move it,” says Rick Troiani, Director of Omni-Channel Engagement Architecture at Sanofi, describing Segment’s ability to create real-time, data-driven profiles. "The big benefit of Segment is not only its ETL capabilities to move data from point A to point B,” he says, “but Segment is also able to unify data quickly in the warehouse before we can send the data to campaign tools."

Achieving a complete 360-degree view of customers by combining offline and online data sources in unified “golden profiles” 

Sanofi initially assessed Twilio Segment as a real-time event aggregation solution but soon realized that Segment’s CDP could provide much more. Using Segment, Sanofi could connect and integrate new tools more easily, build profiles across multiple sources, and activate audiences and journeys for improved customer experiences. Sanofi’s team had discussed building an internal CDP – once they understood Segment’s capabilities, they chose to make it the foundation of their new customer data solution instead.

To start, Sanofi used Segment Connections to quickly integrate data sources and destinations from Segment’s catalog of 400+ out-of-the-box integrations. Crucial tools in Sanofi’s tech stack like Amplitude, Salesforce Cloud, and Akamai were seamlessly connected with Segment quickly. From there, using Segment Profiles, Sanofi was able to connect data across multiple sources and channels to build 360-degree-view “golden profiles”: complete customer profiles created by using Segment Profile Sync tables and joining it with other customer data in the warehouse.

These complete profiles include data collected both before and after a user is “known” to Sanofi’s system. In the past, data from “anonymous” customer interactions—those that occurred before a user submitted identity information to, for example, sign up for an educational webinar—was lost. Sanofi could only track users once they’d logged in. Now, Segment stitches together all historical user data, including data from anonymous interactions, into a profile that provides a richer picture of users’ unique journeys, helping Sanofi improve user interactions and their products. 

The challenge Sanofi previously faced was getting access to all of its customer data sources in real-time; it could take more than 24 hours to unify data in its warehouse and send the data to downstream destinations. With Segment, identity data from multiple destinations is immediately combined in one centralized customer profile. Core data from Sanofi’s CRM, Salesforce Cloud, combined with key data from Akamai, is connected to a Segment ID that marries customer event data with additional important identity information. Raghu Ramen, Omni-channel Digital Architect at Sanofi, says, “It’s mind-blowing to see all customer tables in a single schema. Without Profiles Sync, we could not see the customer data in a single view.” 

Sanofi’s teams can easily query these real-time profiles in Segment to build enhanced, highly personalized customer experiences within the CDP. And now, with Segment’s Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL, these unified, identity-resolved profiles are portable and available in the warehouse. Sanofi can send Segment profiles directly to its data warehouse, enriching them with more valuable data, powering insightful audience analytics.

Using real-time golden profiles to build personalized, omni-channel customer journeys 

With Profiles Sync, Sanofi has up-leveled its ability to personalize healthcare provider communications. Recently, Sanofi launched campaigns across its e-commerce site using real-time audiences and messaging, powered by Segment data, exposing its customers to personalized communications based on previous online and offline interactions.

Using Reverse ETL, Sanofi is able to send customer data from the warehouse to downstream tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud - enabling marketers to easily activate data. Previously, data from sources like Salesforce and Akamai was sent individually and then combined in the marketing tool. As Seth Levenson, Sanofi’s Head of Digital Architecture, describes, “The process before was much more cumbersome and difficult to explain to marketers. Now, Segment allows us to compile data all in one place, forming a Golden Profile, and allows for other teams to easily utilize and activate data.” 

Sanofi has built multiple campaigns using this real-time data. Graduating from generic “Hello Doctor…” emails, Sanofi now sends more complex, targeted messages to HCPs that are relevant to their previous interactions, interests, and needs. Sanofi has taken a more data-driven approach to reaching HCPs, which has positively impacted its ability to educate them and quickly help patients. Measured by various data points, such as prescriptions written, webinars attended, and sales interactions, Sanofi has seen improvements across the board, thanks to the complete customer profiles and ability to personalize its campaigns. 

What’s next? 

In the future, Sales reps in the field will also be able to use this customer knowledge to deliver timely treatment information to busy HCPs, resulting in more rewarding in-person interactions.

Sanofi continues to roll-out new campaigns in more countries, automate the experience, introduce new next best action tools, and continually push the boundaries of the possible across its full omni-channel ecosystem - with OneView at the center!