How AstraZeneca Automated and Cut Cost For Compliance Consulting By 50% With Laiye

COMPANY

AstraZeneca is a global, science-led biopharmaceutical business well known for being involved with developing the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. The British-Swedish multinational company has a portfolio of products for major diseases and constantly pushes the boundaries of science with its goal of delivering life-changing medicines. 

CHALLENGE

While AstraZeneca focuses on innovative science and delivering life-changing medicines, it wants to be more patient-centric and leverage digital technologies and data for its operational processes. 

In compliance consulting, they faced multiple challenges and roadblocks. Therefore, they were looking to automate processes to reduce inefficiencies and improve employee satisfaction. 

AstraZeneca used to rely on a team of 12 employees to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. This process was manual, tedious, and repetitive. It involved the team fulfilling online consultations for more than 8,000 medical representatives and handling a large volume of repetitive reimbursements, meetings, and customer queries. Over 80% of the medical representatives will also ask repeat questions, taking up even more time for the compliance officers. 

On top of that, after consulting, the medical representatives will often request a second response from the compliance officers online to collect relevant documents.

Additionally, during month-ends or events periods, the compliance staff faced significantly large volumes of online queries. To handle the queries timely, many staff had to skip meals. 

For AstraZeneca, having a dedicated team to answer queries round the clock manually is a waste of talent and would result in employee burnout and job dissatisfaction. This would, in turn, cause high employee turnover rates and recruitment issues. 

OUR SOLUTION

AstraZeneca looked to Laiye’s Intelligent Automation solutions to circumvent all of the issues and challenges to help plug these gaps and bring their business to the next level. 

Laiye recommended and built an AI-Powered conversational robot for AstraZeneca that can handle high volumes of compliance consultations. The robot's artificial intelligence (AI) component allows for smart information consultation capable of using professional terms correctly. This is especially important for AstraZeneca as it directly affects the accuracy of their compliance responses. 

How the AI-powered Conversational Was Set Up
Laiye completed the first stage of setting up the AI conversational robot in less than a month. During that period, Laiye extracted AstraZenaca’s databases of frequently asked questions and answers along with standard business protocols. This information was then rapidly organized using AI technology to establish a preliminary knowledge base of over 100 knowledge points. 

Once that was completed, the robot was launched internally for testing to ensure everything ran smoothly. It also allowed the robot to gather new data and questions for its knowledge base.

Once the device had matured and was ready for large-scale implementation, its knowledge base had almost 374 knowledge points, recorded 5,232 questions, and could cover 82.3% of the questions raised by staff and medical representatives. These stats would continuously increase as the robot learns and extracts new data points through usage.

IMPACT

With the help of Laiye, AstraZeneca managed to reduce over 50% of its costs in three months. 

The AI conversational robot can handle queries quickly and accurately — it has an accuracy rate of over 90% and a trigger rate of 98% for intelligent recommendations. This allowed the team of 12 compliance staff more time and energy to do more valuable work. As a result, employee burnout reduced, job satisfaction increased, and employee turnover rate decreased. 

Additionally, through this collaboration, Laiye has also identified further automation opportunities that can encourage greater use of AstraZeneca’s platform and increase engagement opportunities and sales. 

Doctors in remote hospitals struggle to reach medical representatives to answer their demands and queries promptly.  

Laiye plans to build an AI conversational robot that can provide professional technical support for doctors via a mobile interface to solve this problem. The AI robot can help answer doctors’ queries and inform the medical representatives to follow up. This innovation streamlines the process, makes it more efficient for both doctors and medical representatives, and encourages greater use of AstraZeneca’s platform.

Want to know more?

AstraZeneca’s success story shows the cost-effectiveness of implementing intelligent automation solutions in medical and pharmaceutical businesses. Besides optimizing the workforce through conversational robots and reducing costs, it is also scalable and easy to manage. 

Contact our friendly team to discover how much time and effort Laiye can save your company. Also, explore the ways your firm can use the freed-up time to increase sales and improve profitability by reading our success stories.