Transforming webinars into CRM-connected HCP journeys for AstraZeneca

Situation

AstraZeneca UK relied heavily on webinars to engage HCPs, but execution was fragmented across nine brands. Each team used its own platform, agency, and process. The result was high webinar costs, inconsistent attendee experiences, and no consistent way to track outcomes or follow up.

By adopting Onomi, AstraZeneca turned its webinars into a CRM-integrated channel for omnichannel engagement. Within six months, the team consolidated operations, enabled real-time CRM sync, and equipped reps with the insights they needed to follow up with purpose.

Challenge

• Disjointed systems - nine brands using different platforms, vendors, and workflows
• High costs and complexity - each brand had a separate agency managing its webinars
• Slow data integration - event insights took up to three weeks to reach the CRM, delaying follow-up
• Limited engagement visibility - no unified way to track attendance, engagement, or webinar effectiveness

The big issue we had within the UK was that we had nine of our brands all absolutely bought into the fact that webinars were really important and that there was no unified approach to that. Which meant we had nine separate webinar strategies, nine separate platforms, nine separate agencies delivering the work.

It was a huge cost impact that we were having. It was incredibly frustrating for the brand and the external engagements team to actually create a webinar, host a webinar, facilitate a webinar; and it was almost impossible for us to extrapolate any of the amazing information that we need to deliver really great omnichannel strategies.

• Andrew Binns, Head of Digital and Innovation, AstraZeneca

Solution

AstraZeneca partnered with Onomi to consolidate their webinar ecosystem into a single event-powered omnichannel engagement platform, completing the transformation in six months:

• Unified nine brands under one scalable webinar platform
• Captured structured HCP engagement data across every event
• Enabled instant CRM sync to support real-time follow-up
• Improved the HCP experience while reducing operational overhead

Implementation

• Real-time CRM sync - the Veeva Onomi Sync App feeds HCP engagement data straight into the CRM, removing the three-week administrative lag and letting reps act immediately
• Deep engagement tracking - webinars capture more than attendance: polls, Q&A, content downloads, and watch time, so reps can prioritize and personalize follow-ups
• Pre-webinar engagement - HCPs and KOLs review materials and submit questions before the event, lifting registration-to-attendance conversion
• Rep-enabled next best actions - real-time engagement insight in the CRM replaces delayed, generic outreach
• Customizable registration and compliance - HCP verification, localized consent capture, ABPI-compliant job codes, PI and AE links, and support for custom policies
• On-demand and post-webinar engagement - instant replay with on-demand engagement recorded to the CRM, plus automated post-event surveys and follow-up emails
• Interactive experiences - live polling and Q&A, meet-the-expert breakouts, and live translations

Results

1. Webinar-to-CRM sync time reduced from three weeks to instant

HCP engagement data now flows directly into AstraZeneca’s CRM in real time, allowing immediate follow-up by reps.

Feeding the data back into Veeva was a manual nightmare. It would take three weeks for us to literally have a human being pull the delegate information out and import it over into our CRM system, which meant any momentum that we’d gained from the webinar was lost.

Now that is automatically pushed through, which means that we’ve got real time information coming through to our field force.

• Andrew Binns, Head of Digital and Innovation, AstraZeneca

2. Increased webinar engagement and impact

A consistent, optimized attendee experience across all nine brands, with pre-webinar engagement lifting attendance, engagement, and impact.

Onomi was incredibly easy to integrate into Veeva. And we talk about quick timescales. So we started working with Onomi in April and in six months, we’ve now completed that integration piece.

• Andrew Binns, Head of Digital and Innovation, AstraZeneca

3. Cost savings and operational efficiency

Consolidating nine platforms into one reduced vendor costs and cut reliance on third-party agencies, giving internal teams more autonomy and giving reps higher-quality signals for follow-up.

It’s all very well saying, Oh, you know, we had 280 HCPs on a webinar, but if someone can say, well, ‘Dr. Nick did this’ and ‘Dr. Pierre asked these sorts of questions,’ that’s really helpful for the [reps]. And for me as a marketer [that] is proper ROI, because that means that we’re starting to prompt people on that.

• Andrew Binns, Head of Digital and Innovation, AstraZeneca

Conclusion

The platform is incredible for interactivity. It’s not just about breakout rooms and polls. This isn’t just a platform to dump a load of slides on. This is a platform for us to engage with customers.

And that mindset shift within AstraZeneca UK has been absolutely fantastic and is now a core part of our omnichannel strategy rather than what it was before, which was a siloed piece of work.

• Andrew Binns, Head of Digital and Innovation, AstraZeneca

See the integration in action in the Veeva + Onomi Sync App demo.

Deployment: Omnichannel webinar solution - webinar interactivity, pre- and post-webinar engagement, compliance, Veeva CRM integration, engagement capture and reporting. AstraZeneca UK, nine brands.