{"id":35863,"date":"2026-07-14T08:37:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T06:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/askme.it\/insights\/omnichannel-pharma-in-italy-the-paradox-of-the-64-f2f\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T17:54:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T15:54:47","slug":"omnichannel-pharma-in-italy-the-paradox-of-the-64-f2f","status":"publish","type":"insights","link":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/insights\/omnichannel-pharma-in-italy-the-paradox-of-the-64-f2f\/","title":{"rendered":"Omnichannel pharma in Italy: the paradox of the 64% F2F"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Veeva Pulse Field Trends Report for the second quarter of 2025 measured in the field, through more than 600 million HCP interactions collected from 80% of global biopharma field teams, a reality that contradicts most of the public narrative in the industry: the global HCP engagement mix is 78% face-to-face and 22% digital. Companies that have integrated inbound channels \u2014 HCP portals, on-demand content delivery, reactive requests \u2014 rebalance toward 42% F2F and 58% digital, but remain a minority. Average HCP access in Europe has risen to 52% post-pandemic, with dermatology, oncology and cardiology above 60%, but 65% of accessible HCPs limit their interactions to a maximum of three pharmaceutical companies.<\/p>\n

Italy, within this European picture, is the most extreme case. IQVIA data published in November 2025 estimates the preference for face-to-face at 46% in Italy and Spain versus 25% in the United Kingdom, and places the Italian market first in EU5 for the share of sales impactable by F2F \u2014 64% \u2014 and for the alignment of the channel mix to HCP-declared preferences \u2014 67%. Email preference grew to 14% in 2024 from 10% in 2023, and phone preference remained confirmed at 3%. The real operational paradox for companies planning their engagement strategy in 2026 is not how to shift the Italian market toward remote, but how to orchestrate a coherent experience around a face-to-face that remains the single highest-value channel.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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The 3x gap: 60% want remote, 40% receive it<\/h2>\n

The Across Health survey published in its Navigator365 of 2024 contains a weighty data point: 60% of European HCPs declare they are interested in remote engagement with the pharmaceutical sales force, but only 40% receive it. It is a 50% gap that reflects a structural under-supply of the remote channel by companies. It is not a demand problem: it is a delivery problem. The companies that have reacted are those that have explicitly built a field organization that alternates F2F and remote based on the HCP’s declared preferences, with tools such as Veeva Engage Meeting integrated into the rep’s workflow and Across Health Navigator as a preference-detection platform.<\/p>\n

The practical consequence is a reconfiguration of value per visit. ZoomRx detected, in studies subsequent to 2022, that the average duration of an F2F visit has risen to about sixteen minutes, against a pre-pandemic value that had been crushed below three minutes for “door-to-door” visits. Companies no longer have the possibility of maintaining high volumes of low-quality visits: F2F has become the most expensive contact mode per minute available, and must be treated as such. Remote is the channel that manages frequency between F2F visits, not the channel that replaces them.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Synchronized beats numbered: +60% Rx with sales-marketing sync<\/h2>\n

The highest return measured on pharma omnichannel engagement is the one published by Veeva Pulse in 2024: synchronized engagement between sales force and marketing produces a 60% increase in prescription rates compared to non-synchronized engagement. It is a data point that reconfigures the main omnichannel KPI: not how many channels are activated, but how coordinated they are with one another. An email campaign launched two weeks after an F2F visit on the wrong topic is worth less than a campaign launched seven days later on the right topic, and the companies that have built coordination pipelines around Next Best Action are seeing it in the numbers.<\/p>\n

McKinsey has quantified in several recurring publications from 2023-2024 the return on pharma omnichannel maturity at a revenue growth between 5 and 10%, marketing efficiency between 10 and 20%, prescriber increase between 3 and 5% and HCP satisfaction increase between 5 and 10%. BCG documents in 2025 a case of a specialty pharma with a value uplift of around 200 million dollars and a ten-fold increase in HCP reach thanks to omnichannel transformation. ZS developed in 2024 a pharma omnichannel assessment methodology across seven dimensions \u2014 channel breadth, digital transformation office, content supply chain, data platform, analytics, AI ecosystem, integrated orchestration \u2014 applied to more than fifteen European and thirteen global companies, with the finding that personalization and orchestration are still in early stages in most organizations.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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NBA as orchestrator: the real core of omnichannel<\/h2>\n

Between October and December 2025 the market saw the most relevant technological convergence of the last five years on the topic of orchestration. Veeva brought AI Agents for Vault CRM to general availability on December 3, including Pre-call Agent, Voice Agent, Free Text Agent and Media Agent, with an Anthropic and Amazon technology stack on Bedrock. Salesforce brought Agentforce Life Sciences to general availability on October 11, with voice-activated account prep, hands-free narrated briefing and talk-to-text. Aktana, one of the most widespread pharma NBA platforms, was acquired in January 2026 by PharmaForceIQ with the repositioning of an “optichannel-in-a-box” based on 100 million field suggestions and 85 validated use cases, with deployment times of 6-8 weeks.<\/p>\n

The structural point is that the “core” of pharma omnichannel in 2026 has shifted from the CRM to the Next Best Action engine. The CRM continues to be the system of record, but the system that generates value \u2014 the system that decides who to contact, on which channel, with which message, at which moment \u2014 is the orchestration layer that sits above it. The companies that have built this layer with a coherent strategy, and not as a collection of disconnected pilots on individual channels, are those that measure the +5-10% in revenue cited by McKinsey. The others are still paying licenses for channels that do not talk to each other.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Toward the Italian 2026: F2F as multiplier<\/h2>\n

For Italian pharmaceutical companies the operational message of 2026 is not “let’s reduce F2F”. It is “let’s transform F2F into the multiplier of the rest of the mix”. The Italian rep remains the channel of maximum trust for the HCP \u2014 the 67% alignment to declared preferences is the highest value in EU5 \u2014 and the single F2F interaction is worth more than it is worth in any other European market. The strategic question is not whether to replace it, it is how to amplify it. The approved email becomes the tool that consolidates the points of the last visit; the HCP portal becomes the source of documentation that the physician recalls in the following six months; the webinar becomes the channel that maintains frequency between one F2F visit and the next; remote becomes the option for HCPs who are geographically distant or hard to reach.<\/p>\n

The Italian regulatory constraint configures this orchestration in a specific way. The Farmindustria Code of Conduct of February 21, 2025 and Sanita Trasparente operational since 2025 require classification and traceability of every promotional message, public disclosure of transfers of value above thresholds, explicit GDPR consent for electronic communications. An effective Italian pharma omnichannel platform in 2026 is one that integrates these constraints into the design of the process, not one that tries to import a US blueprint and adapt it after the fact. The 64% F2F paradox is not a limit of the Italian market: it is its competitive identity. The companies that know how to orchestrate it will have the advantage. The others will pay the Veeva or Salesforce license exactly like everyone else, without the return.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Veeva Pulse 2025: 78% of global HCP interactions remain face-to-face. In Italy 64% of impactable sales come from direct contact, the highest share in EU5. Across Health measures that European HCPs want remote engagement at 60% and receive it at 40%. What it really means to orchestrate in a market that remains F2F-dominant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":35865,"menu_order":0,"template":"","insights_category":[968],"insights_tags":[896,898,793,897,899],"class_list":["post-35863","insights","type-insights","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","insights_category-ai-and-pharma","insights_tags-hcp-engagement","insights_tags-multichannel","insights_tags-omnichannel-en","insights_tags-remote-detailing","insights_tags-veeva-pulse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/35863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/insights"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/35863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35864,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/35863\/revisions\/35864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"insights_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights_category?post=35863"},{"taxonomy":"insights_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights_tags?post=35863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}