This article is the third of four parts that will help you improve your customer experience. 

The pharmaceutical industry has taken a historically product centric approach – as opposed to customer centric approach – when it comes to customer engagement.  

Other industries and companies—such as Apple, Amazon, and Netflix—have mastered the art of customer centric engagement, orchestrating customer experiences that are both highly personalized and adaptive. In contrast, the pharmaceutical sector has struggled to keep pace, despite having access to rich customer data.  

The reasons for this are complex. Pharma operates in a highly regulated environment, and the primary customer is not always necessarily clear (e.g. patients, HCPs, regulators, pharmacists, KOL community). But a key reason for this gap lies in the sector’s structural limitations: pharmaceutical organizations are notoriously siloed, with divisions across R&D, commercial, medical, access, marketing, and patient services operating independently. To deliver a truly seamless customer experience, pharma will need to change its operating model. 

This article is the third of four and delves into our point of view on how to develop an operating model which aligns people, processes, and technology to your new CX strategy, and defining KPIs to measure impact and success.  

Developing an Operating Model for CX Success 

Organizing People Around the Customer  

Traditionally, the sales representative has been the cornerstone of the pharmaceutical commercial model. While this sales-led approach has been effective in the past, it is approaching a point of diminishing returns, limiting pharma’s ability to deliver a truly tailored and seamless experience for HCPs across both traditional and digital channels. 

To create a truly customer-centric experience, pharma must rethink its organizational structure. Siloed departments hinder the execution of omnichannel customer engagement strategies, as HCP touchpoints are fragmented across multiple functions, systems, and teams. Overcoming this challenge requires a fundamental mind-set shift and a new organizational design. 

As a first step to address this issue, it could be the formation of integrated, cross-functional teams. These teams would be composed of members from commercial, marketing, medical affairs, and customer support, all working together to customize the engagement journeys of different specific customer segments and personas.  

But, this can be taken a step further by positioning the marketer—rather than the sales rep—at the center of customer engagement. Achieving this transformation requires a fundamental change in both the organization’s structure and talent capabilities. It will also require the introduction of new roles like “CX Champions”, “Customer Journey Leads”, or “Customer Engagement Designers”. These roles will require new talent and skillsets. They will be responsible for designing personalized, predictive, and adaptable customer journeys, built on a deep understanding of the diverse needs and preferences of HCPs. These roles will serve as the voice of the customer, ensuring that engagement strategies are not only product-centric but inclusive of the full portfolio relevant to each HCP specialty. 

Organizing Processes Around the Customer  

Most pharma companies lack a structured process for planning truly personalized customer engagement. Today, the approach typically follows this sequence: 

• Product teams develop cross-functional Brand Plans, outlining strategic imperatives, critical success factors, and key tactics to drive commercial success. 

• Agencies are brought in to create content. This content often has a limited set of messages and formats and is designed for sales teams to use in their interactions with customers. 

• In-house digital marketing teams attempt to personalize this content; however, they often work in isolation from the product teams and lack deep expertise in the disease area, product strategy, and desired behaviour change that the content is trying to drive. 

This model is fundamentally flawed because it creates a disconnect between brand strategy and tactical execution—leading to generic and ineffective customer engagement. 

To address this, pharma must implement a new customer engagement planning process—one that bridges strategy with execution. This is where new roles, like the ´Customer Journey Lead´ come in. Their job is to ensure that every interaction is informed by customer insights, aligned to the product strategy, and optimized across channels for maximum impact. The ´Customer Journey Lead´ will play a key role in leveraging preference analytics and defining the triggers which determine what content to deliver to each customer and through which channel. The engagement journeys that they develop will serve as a roadmap for marketing operations, enabling them to seamlessly orchestrate and deploy all the components of the customer engagement journey.  

To support this, pharma will also need to develop more modular content (e.g. key message, aesthetics, and tonality), to enable personalization of engagement – an AI enabled content generation, management and review process can help achieve this. 

Enabling Customer-Centricity through Technology 

Technology will be the cornerstone of the new CX era in pharma. Companies are increasingly adopting Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to break down silos and establish a unified, single source of truth for customer data. Centralizing this data enables personalized engagement and seamless omnichannel orchestration. However, pharma lags behind industries like retail and tech in CDP adoption due to regulatory constraints, legacy systems, and deeply ingrained silos. Overcoming these barriers will be key to unlocking data-driven, customer-centric engagement at scale. 

To design automated customer engagement journeys, at scale across channels, content and triggers, we also expect to see more use of engagement design tools. Adobe, Microsoft, and other companies make tools that seamlessly integrate with downstream marketing operations systems.  

• Journey Orchestration & Customer Engagement Platforms: These tools help design, automate, and optimize customer engagement journeys across multiple channels. 

• Modular Content Platforms: These tools enable the creation of adaptive content that can be dynamically personalized for different customers.  

• AI-Driven Decisioning & Next-Best-Action (NBA) Tools: These tools leverage AI and predictive analytics to optimize engagement sequences and customer journeys dynamically. 

Ultimately, the best technology and tools for your organization will vary based on your company´s specific tech stack and the features and functionality that you require to execute your strategy. 

Please refer to the second paper in this series to get an in depth perspective on Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Next Best Action (NBA) technology.  

Establishing the Right KPIs  

Imagine you’ve implemented your new operating model—aligning people, processes, and technology to enhance customer engagement. But how can you be sure it’s working? Has CX truly improved? 

To embed customer-centricity into an organization, it must be measured, tracked, and incentivized. While traditional KPIs like revenue and volume remain important, they should be complemented by customer-focused metrics that assess the quality of engagement and experience. 

Examples of key CX metrics to track… 

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Measures how satisfied customers are with their interactions at each touchpoint, offering direct feedback on experience quality. 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Gauges customer loyalty and trust by assessing how likely HCPs are to recommend your product. 

• Time to Resolution: Tracks how quickly customer inquiries, issues, or service requests are addressed—highlighting responsiveness and commitment to customer care. 

• Various Engagement Metrics: Analyzes how HCPs interact with your content and platforms, including email response rates, portal usage, and time spent on digital tools. 

When KPIs are directly tied to customer experience and engagement, teams are naturally incentivized to prioritize customer-centric strategies. This shift fosters a culture where customer experience is placed at the center of decision making.