How CX design and operational focus are reshaping launch success and in-market performance.
Customer Experience (CX) is how stakeholders see and feel their interactions with an organization. It underpins long-term loyalty, treatment adherence, advocacy, revenue growth, operational efficiency, and profitability.
Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the ability to consistently understand and meet stakeholder needs—helping them achieve their goals while enabling the business to succeed.
CX and CXM for patients, providers, payers, caregivers, and other stakeholders are increasingly seen as competitive advantages in pharma.
Industry leaders are emerging—Eli Lilly, for example, has discussed CX in Investor Days, 10-Qs, and Annual Reports. Meanwhile, companies like Ro, Hims & Hers, and Noom are creating experience-led, direct-to-consumer digital health platforms that make healthcare more user-friendly, personalized, and accessible.
To stay ahead, this top 10 pharmaceutical company has been building its CX foundation over the past few years. It is now beginning to embed and scale CX across brands to shorten time to treatment, improve adherence, and increase repeat use among healthcare professionals (HCPs).
CX blueprints, shared language, and enablement hubs empowered cross-functional teams to deliver reliably, measure what matters, and continuously optimize outcomes.
Customer experience isn’t just a service layer—it’s a business driver. When embedded into operations, CX boosts satisfaction, accelerates adoption, and improves outcomes across patients, providers, and brands.
Stronger Satisfaction and Adherence
Improves overall experiences and loyalty
Increases treatment adherence and retention
Builds trust with patients and HCPs
Greater Market Share
Influences 35% of prescribing decisions
First 6 months post-launch shape market share
Launch success drives 81% of drug sales
Higher Physician Confidence
HCPs are 2x more likely to prescribe
Better outcomes through engaged, informed HCPs
Stronger engagement via preferred communication channels
The pharmaceutical landscape is evolving rapidly, with heightened expectations from stakeholders and intensifying pressure to drive measurable outcomes. While many organizations have recognized the importance of customer experience (CX), translating that recognition into action remains a major challenge.
External: Complexity, risk, and missed opportunities
The pharmaceutical landscape is more complex—and risk-laden—than ever. Poor management of communications, digital tools, or patient data can trigger compliance failures with serious financial and reputational consequences. Yet when customer experience (CX) is done right, it reduces risk, improves transparency, and strengthens ethical engagement.
Despite investments in technology, many organizations are hamstrung by siloed systems, manual workflows, and fragmented digital tools. This slows decisions, hinders collaboration, and creates friction across the enterprise. Real-world data is underutilized not due to lack of access, but because the experience architecture and organizational capabilities haven’t kept pace.
Common challenges include:
Generic, impersonal communication
Disconnected tools and workflows
Gaps in onboarding and support
Rising compliance and transparency pressures
Underused real-world data and insights
Modern experience strategies and capabilities address these issues head-on, helping to connect systems, streamline processes and reduce friction, and enable smarter, more personalized engagement.
Because when patients and providers struggle to access what they need, engagement falters, outcomes worsen, and trust erodes. That’s why forward-thinking pharma leaders view experience leadership not as a “nice to have” but as a strategic imperative—and a powerful competitive edge. It’s not just about keeping up. It’s about setting the pace.
Internal: Belief Without Structure
For many organizations, CX is embraced in principle but lacks the structure to scale. What began as a grassroots movement supported by executive enthusiasm struggled to gain broad traction, or translate into measurable impact.
Across departments and brands, different teams interpreted CX in their own ways. This has led to inconsistent methodologies, fragmented execution, and a lack of shared understanding around what great experience looks like—or how to deliver it.
CX efforts are frequently:
Siloed or duplicated across brands
Misaligned with business goals
Lacking in consistent governance
Underserved by centralized tools or resources
Another barrier is capacity. As demand for CX expertise grows, the limited number of dedicated resources can’t scale to support every brand or initiative.
To move forward, our client recognized the need to democratize CX—equipping cross-functional teams with the right tools, shared frameworks, and mindset to embed experience into everyday work. By doing so, CX becomes not just a philosophy, but an operational reality.
With leadership aligned on the need to move customer experience (CX) from a top-down concept to a bottom-up, operational discipline, McorpCX was engaged to develop core CX capabilities, embed them within brand operations, and build a scalable model to evolve those capabilities over the next five years.
Embedding CX into In-Market Brand Operations
To improve the delivery of experience across in-market brands, McorpCX worked directly with brand teams to establish consistent, scalable foundations for customer experience management.
Aligning teams on shared processes and language via a current-state data dictionary
Establishing a foundation for CX impact measurement
Mapping communication flows and building a timeline of event-based communications—piloted with one brand, then scaled
Creating a proprietary HCP Index linking operational and behavioral metrics to provider perceptions, highlighting effective confidence-building tactics
Analyzing competitor programs to reveal gaps and opportunities for differentiation
The investment in CX is doing more than building trust— it’s shaping how we engage patients, providers, and partners to drive measurable value.
These efforts helped move CX from strategy into practice, embedding experience-driven approaches and establishing a foundation for continuous improvement.
Integrating CX into Launch Strategy
As a pharmaceutical brand prepared to enter a competitive therapeutic category, McorpCX worked with cross-functional teams to make customer experience central to the launch. Key actions included:
Conducting patient and HCP research to map the therapy switch journey and identify key decision drivers
Pinpointing CX factors that influenced therapy switching, guiding experience-led priorities
Aligning patient, HCP, and delivery efforts across digital, physical, and internal enablers like people, process, and tech
Designing a tailored patient support program to deliver value from day one
Embedding CX into the full launch strategy—not as a side effort, but as the guiding lens for execution
The result was a more connected, insight-driven strategy that reflected real-world expectations, driving faster adoption, stronger engagement, and long-term brand confidence among both patients and providers.
Building a Scalable CX Foundation
To support long-term, enterprise-wide impact, McorpCX worked with the organization to define and embed customer experience management (CXM) as a strategic capability.
This included:
Defining a clear CXM vision that aligned teams and linked CX to business outcomes
Creating step-by-step blueprints for Experience Measurement and Journey Management
Launching a centralized SharePoint hub for CX tools, templates, and best practices
These efforts equipped teams with shared frameworks and practical resources, enabling consistent application of CX across brands. The result: stronger experiences, improved satisfaction and trust, and better business performance.
While the transformation is still underway, Customer Experience (CX) is steadily gaining traction—integrating into brand operations and driving stronger outcomes across key stakeholders, including patients, providers, payers, and caregivers. The organization is now establishing mechanisms to directly link CX efforts with business impact.
Several key milestones have contributed to momentum and measurable progress:
A dedicated CXM SharePoint hub was launched, improving access to tools and resources, and increasing organizational understanding and support.
CXM was repositioned within a new organizational structure to serve as a key capability for pre-market brand readiness and launch execution.
CX practices were embedded in priority launch brands to improve coordination and delivery—using journey mapping, experience measurement, and patient support design.
CX-developed reporting views were integrated into monthly brand reviews and quarterly business reporting, enhancing leadership visibility and data-driven decision-making.
A new speaker experience measurement program was introduced to evaluate the effectiveness of medical education efforts and inform targeted improvements.
These efforts are building a foundation for sustainable change—elevating the role of CX from isolated initiatives to an enterprise-wide capability.
CX is no longer a soft skill—it’s a strategic lever embedded in how we launch, support, and scale brands.
As the U.S. pharmaceutical industry continues to evolve— with accelerated digital health adoption, financial constraints, and growing macroeconomic pressures— this organization is investing in CX not just as a means of adaptation, but as a long-term differentiator.
Their commitment is doing more than improving experiences—it’s embedding CX into the way the business operates. From patient support to provider engagement, from payer alignment to caregiver empowerment, CX is becoming a core driver of trust, performance, and competitive advantage.
This shift positions the company to set a new standard across the healthcare ecosystem—one rooted in empathy, efficiency, and measurable impact.
McorpCX is independently recognized as a top customer experience services and solutions company, enabling and guiding leading organizations since 2002.
Touchpoint Mapping®, Touchpoint Metrics® and Loyalty Mapping® are registered trademarks of McorpCX, LLC