Mavens reinvents identity and access management in the cloud

Introduction

Ask the average person about Nexium, Lipitor, Adderall or Tamiflu and they’re likely to recall the symptoms and diseases that at least one of these drugs treat, even if they haven’t used it themselves. We have the marketing talents of drug manufacturers — and their many websites, emails, blogs, advertisements, apps and clinical findings — to thank for this. 

And, while the end marketing experiences these individuals seem like they're created effortlessly, there’s underlying complexity pertaining to content creation, delivery, maintenance and above all, regulation. Drug manufacturers must obtain visitor consent and accompany any and all content with legal notices. Visitor consent and any other information collected must be recorded and safely stored for future auditing. 

To sidestep lawsuits, pharma companies hire contractors to build apps and websites that address their unique regulatory, login and customer management needs. The entire process, from hiring a contractor to approval for the final product, is costly and lengthy, which Mavens Consulting, a consultant group that crafts innovative, cloud-based solutions for biotech, pharma and rare disease companies, recognized. They motioned to remedy these industry-wide concerns by creating the Identity & Consent Cloud, an identity and access management tool powered by the Salesforce Identify platform and Contentful that replaces piecemeal user management.

A targeted, customer-focused solution

The solution addresses obvious pharma marketing requirements — developing a secure, responsive and intuitive-to-use login form — and more sophisticated ones, such as storing data, encrypting credentials and managing access to user data. Everything from a basic login flow to consent modules and visitor profiles can be added to a website, app or a digital kiosk with the integration of Mavens Consulting’s tool. Once visitors register and log in, their data is stored in Salesforce, centralizing information and making it immediately accessible to authorized users. 

The Identity & Consent Cloud gives pharma companies a more holistic view of visitors they serve. They leverage the data they collect to improve customer experiences by serving relevant, tailored information. "When drug manufacturers implement custom authentication solutions, visitor data scatters across silos,” explains Ian Glazer, senior director of identity at Salesforce.com. “These gaps result in customer interactions that are late, impersonal or that don’t happen at all. Integrated identity services help create cohesive, 360-degree views of every customer.”

Separating look from the functionality

To convince pharma companies that the Identity & Consent Cloud could bring real value to marketing initiatives, Mavens Consulting needed to make sure login pages could be customized and include authentication. This feature was important, as industry studies show that visitors often terminate sessions when redirected to external authentication websites.

Mavens Consulting engineers considered bringing the product to all major CMS platforms as an IAM plugin. “We quickly dropped the idea after seeing the staggering cost and time it would take to build,” explains Paul Battisson, lead technical architect of EMEA at Mavens Consulting. They fell back on the idea of adding a headless CMS to the mix, despite Paul’s misgivings. For the approach to work, the CMS would need to be well-documented, offer low-latency APIs and provide flexibility to change content schemes and customize user interfaces.

After evaluating several vendors, developers showed a preference for Contentful. “We considered how different vendors stacked up with our requirements — Contentful stood out. It was the most mature solution on the market,” says Paul. The engineers’ enthusiasm really sealed the deal. “Our developers loved Contentful’s API docs and SDKs. And for every question we filed with support, we received a thorough explanation with examples and best practices. Who could resist that?”

Contentful serves two roles in the setup championed by Mavens Consulting. The first is that it collects content and helps structure it for use in different spaces. The second is that it helps the design team easily define the look of pages. They use dedicated content types to serve stylesheets and define the visual elements of login pages.

“With a simple interface, editors and designers can safely manage and deploy new designs and content. It’s more efficient than how things were done in the past,” explains Samuel Rosen, lead identity and consent architect. With Mavens Consulting’s solution, marketing teams can take responsibility for making edits that address industry updates and new customer needs — they don’t have to rely on developers to push changes.

One tool to serve many countries

For the global pharmaceuticals market, manufacturers must navigate numerous legal, technical and logistical hurdles. As Samuel explains, “Localizing consent goes beyond translating legal disclaimers. There are regulatory requirements on data collection, data storage and what marketing activities are permitted.” For example, in the United States, marketing opt-ins don’t have an expiration date. In Germany, they last just six months.

Traditionally, pharma companies met these requirements by building market-specific sites and apps. With Mavens Consulting’s Identity & Consent Cloud, companies simply have to add a new consent policy to an existing login page. This way, registration form fields, disclaimer text and user data permissions are automatically updated to reflect the regulatory framework applicable to the visitor’s country, but the website stays the same. 

With Contentful, this cost-effective solution includes the option to localize the content. On the content creation side, roles and permissions can be configured for specific content types and specific languages. On the content delivery side, a single API-endpoint delivers all entry versions. “To retrieve content in a specific language, we simply include the language parameter in the query,” remarks Paul.