Implementing an agile approach to improve customer experience and provision of healthcare in Europe

Successful customer engagement at Daiichi Sankyo Europe (DSE)

Our goal in the Specialty Medicines division at DSE is to protect people from cardiovascular disease (CVD) and help those who suffer from it to enjoy every precious moment that life has to offer. We are experts in providing innovative medicines, and success for us means that we are reliable and consistent when delivering for our customers and stakeholders. Winning their loyalty and enthusiasm is crucial for us to become the preferred partner in stemming the tide of CVD in Europe. To that end, we measure success through the Net Promoter Score (NPS) method, an important indicator of customer satisfaction, as well as a metric which helps analyse business growth.

Since we have been focusing on the customer as the centre of our services, we have seen a consistent upward trend in customer perceptions of our company. This is a very encouraging signal for us, as it shows that our new commercial approach is moving the business forward. It helps us better understand our customers’ needs and perceptions of DSE, and whether we are being recognised as a leading partner in CVD care.

Alongside the NPS, we also measure customer experience by looking at interactions with our field representatives, scientific congress participation, and satisfaction with our services – asking ourselves whether we are responding in ways that are truly relevant for our customers, for example. The feedback so far has been extremely positive and has shown that our customers are starting to perceive DSE as a trusted, long-term scientific partner.

The thinking behind our new approach

The world is constantly changing, and I think that during the last three years we have seen immense changes that affect our day-to-day working lives. The pandemic in particular has resulted in a great shift in the way we interact with customers, and the emergence of new innovative technologies have become embedded across the customer journey. To best support our customers in providing patient care, we have had to adapt to this new world.

Central to our new approach is a commitment to providing an outstanding customer experience throughout all interactions. We therefore evolved our operating model from a uniform customer engagement approach, to one that focuses on truly bespoke and relevant services at its core. A new business mindset and agile ways of working are integral parts of this approach. ?

Core principles underpinning our approach

The starting point to develop our approach was defining our purpose: we care for every heartbeat. We want to support our customers in managing CV risks with their patient populations, making appropriate treatment decisions, and thus helping reduce the impact of CV disease in Europe.

To achieve this, we leverage advanced analytics to gain a deeper understanding of our customers’ needs and preferences. This includes analysing which communication channels they prefer, how frequently they would like to interact with us, and their personal areas of interest. We also identify our customers’ preferred communication type, based on their behaviour and personality profile. This enables us to make sure the content we produce is personalised and meaningful for each of them.

Whilst all important regulatory information is conveyed consistently about our medicines, the way we present this information is tailored to each customer based on their preferences. Integrating Agile methodology into this approach means that we are working faster, with more focus and flexibility to improve customer experience.

Lessons learnt from integration

Executing any novel approach is always challenging. It takes time for local, successful teams to embrace changes to their current ways of working. It is vital that we demonstrate the benefits of this new model and engage teams with a new mindset, while at the same time increasing employees’ competencies and skills. This is the best way to bring teams on this journey.

The second lesson has been to keep moving step by step; to fail forward by continuous learning. Integrating agile ways of working into our processes has helped us make quicker decisions in response to customers’ changing needs. We understand that these decisions may not always be immediately perfect. Only by failing can you really learn – so we are continuously measuring the impact of our customer interactions and adapting our approach accordingly.

Reflections on the approach so far

To date, we have implemented our new approach across various European markets, and have seen positive results. In one market, for example, we tested a simple, personalised email to individual customers versus a broad standardised approach to see the reaction it received. This method was all about hyper-personalisation, and it resulted in a significant positive change in customers’ perception of DSE.

In another market, we used a pilot group to look at frequency of communication. We observed that if we adhered to the recommended frequency within certain thresholds, we saw a positive impact on business growth.

These results have helped our teams to understand how to best engage our customers and how to do it most efficiently in terms of their time investment and our resource allocation. Advanced analytics has shown that we don't necessarily need to interact more with our customers – but we do need to find the best ways to interact, to become a better partner to them.

Looking forward to the future

In my experience, implementing Agile in large organisations takes a minimum of three years. We started two years ago, initially concentrating on our four biggest markets and now we are starting to expand to more markets in Europe, leveraging all our previous learnings. We are making sure colleagues at DSE understand why there is a need for change, putting the processes in place and building competencies and skills among the various teams.

Importantly, we are also sharing our experiences of the Agile customer experience approach and how it is successfully supporting the needs of the healthcare community and patients – because, in the end, this is what it is all about: improving patient outcomes and supporting better cardiovascular health in Europe.