Serving up customer experience excellence

Pharma struggles to differentiate the experiences it provides, missing opportunities to achieve desirable business results and help HCPs at their point of need

By Tim van Tongeren

When a restaurant surprises you by serving an exceptional dish it is likely you walk out as a happy customer. Especially when the service, presentation, location, or many other aspects of the total dining experience are in place too. When you have an excellent customer experience (CX), you know it and you want to have it again.

To be able to provide such an ‘on-stage’ experience, chefs have a pre-eminent place. They must perfect their cooking techniques, know where to source the ingredients from, and gather insights into different flavours. Equally, they won’t be able to exceed the expectations of their patrons if they don’t have access to the right utensils and appliances, or if the way they work together with supporting staff – perhaps even the ‘vibe’ in the kitchen – breaks down. The fruits of this ‘behind-the-scenes’ setting in the kitchen are directly responsible for the most important part of any restaurant experience – the food that reaches a customer’s table.

Looking beyond the realm of fine dining – whether at a Michelin-starred restaurant or a roadside snack shop, this restaurant analogy is one I’ve repeatedly called to mind during more than a decade of advisory and research into pharma’s behind-the-scenes people, process and tech capabilities, and the consequent on-stage experiences the industry delivers to HCPs and patients.

Most recently our research has focused on the industry’s on-stage interactions with healthcare professionals (HCPs), with the latest report on the state of customer experience in the global pharmaceutical industry involving 6,100 HCPs across 13 countries and eight therapy areas. The 2024 data in the report shines a light on the types of experiences pharma companies are serving up, and whether they delight or disappoint HCPs.

The data was collected between January and February this year for a survey in which respondents ranked two of the most recent interactions that they recall with a pharma company.

These were then assessed through the lens of our Customer Experience Quotient (CXQ), a pharma-specific metric that we’ve applied to HCP and patient research since 2017.

The CXQ benchmarks reveal whether individual pharma companies are serving up exemplary experiences, but it’s a level of distinction that the industry is struggling to reach.  Overall, in this year’s survey the industry still hasn’t been able to make any moves to excellence, with the data showing an almost static overall global CXQ score of 58 – a drop of one point since our previous survey that again gives pharma just a ‘good’ score in our rankings. Although this relative stability is to some extent welcomed after the disruptions of COVID-19, it also exposes the challenge the industry faces if it is to improve – in a consistent and ongoing manner – the customer experiences it provides.

Dig a little deeper beneath this apparent ‘business as usual’ picture and this year’s global CXQ report shows a CX landscape experiencing a high degree of flux. Only four countries – the UK, Brazil, Australia and Turkey – improved their scores, as other key markets around the world struggled to show gains.

There was a downward trend across the eight specialty areas tracked in the report, with just scores from GP respondents improving slightly, while those specialising in dermatology, diabetes, haematology and gastroenterology all rated their experiences with pharma lower than in our 2022 report.

‘The price of underperforming and failing to meet HCP expectations should be an everyday element of pharma’s commercial consideration’

At a company level, we saw that experiences are undifferentiated: most of the companies typically have CXQ scores within 10-15 points of each other. At the upper reaches of the benchmark there was fierce competition to lead, with UCB holding onto the first place it gained in our previous survey, but slipping back by one point to achieve a score of 65 in 2024. Just one point behind were Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine and Lilly, whose shared CXQ scores of 64 underline the competitive nature of this space.

Figure 1: Video calls fall from favour as in-person visits rise to the top

Although capability levels differ, pharma companies have a menu of options for how they choose to engage key stakeholders like HCPs. Tracking the levels of CX for these different channels over the years provides some revealing insights.

If we look first at the historical picture, the top performing channels were virtual events during COVID-19. That leading level of CX was then provided by video calls from medical reps (medical science liaisons) in our post-pandemic survey, and then this year face-to-face meetings with medical reps topped the chart with a CXQ score of 67.

The 2024 survey also showed several channels to be in resurgence (see figure 1). Alongside CX improvements for face-to-face meetings with medical and sales reps, virtual events bounced back too. There was also a surprising point in the data from the better-than-expected experiences delivered by email newsletters, outperforming one-to-one rep emails and going against a general picture of higher ratings for many of the personal interactions in digital and non-digital channels.

It should be noted that the findings are not calibrated to provide data on HCP preferences, rather they track channel performance through a CX lens, highlighting a series of shifts over time that suggest the COVID-19-era phrase ‘the new normal’ will be a state of ongoing change rather than a single settled position.

Figure 2: CX plays an integral role in HCP prescribing decisions

At a personal level we instinctively know the importance of the experiences we receive – from dining establishments and beyond – but we might not be able to express it more firmly than knowing there are certain restaurants we will never visit again. CX in pharma is different.

Differentiated (or leading) customer experiences consistently relate to a wide variety of desirable business results, including changes in HCPs’ prescribing behaviour, view of a firm, or willingness to interact through digital channels. That quantifiable impact of CX on prescribing was reconfirmed in our latest survey, which found that CX accounts for 35% of the prescription decision-making process (see figure 2). The HCPs in our survey told us that 50% of their decision-making is led by product features like safety, efficacy and dosing, and that the reputation of the company they’re talking to drives the remaining 15% of decision-making.

The level of experiences that HCPs receive from pharma has a further important influence on which medicines will be used. We found that providing an excellent level of CX doubles the likelihood that a product will be prescribed. It also drives a sharp increase in the proportion of HCPs who say they would be confident using a company’s product with their patients, with this rising from 40% for HCPs that have poor experiences to 74% when they are provided with an excellent level of CX.

‘Delivering customer excellence involves a cocktail of responsibilities, but customer experience is only as good as its constituent elements’

An understanding of CX in pharma has become mainstream since I first started covering this topic in 2009; now the price of underperforming and failing to meet HCP expectations should also be an everyday element of pharma’s commercial considerations.

Exceeding the expectations of HCPs, as well as the C-suite, cannot be achieved by focusing on the on-stage experiences a company serves – for example, by just putting the equivalent of a branded lamp on the wall or ensuring patrons have the best cutlery in front of them. Pharma firms must now focus behind the scenes on how well they are organised to deliver those experiences, how mature their capabilities are and whether they have the organisational readiness to be able to shine in front of their customers.

Having direct kitchen experience in my late teenage years, I’ve seen first-hand the relationship between the way kitchens are managed and how food tastes and is presented on the plate. Delivering customer excellence involves a cocktail of responsibilities, but CX is only as good as its constituent elements, and if one element is out of place it can trip up the entire operation – and the same is certainly true for pharma.

Tim van Tongeren is Managing Director at DT Consulting, an Indegene company