The challenge
The vision to enhance customer experience focuses on differentiating the organization’s brands and transforming customer experience. The program focuses on maximizing engagement value through highly personalized, impactful engagement enabled by a data-driven and customer-centric approach. Launched in September 2024 in the Dutch affiliate as a one-size fits all approach, the program aims to address business challenges with precision engagement using digital and analytics insights. To track the brand team progress on the adoption of the program, the global organization introduced a self-assessment to assess the baseline.
The December 2024 baseline assessment revealed identical outcomes across brand teams, despite varying levels of adoption of this program. This inconsistency challenged the ability to deliver uniform customer experience and maximize engagement value. It highlighted the need for a more tailored approach to embed the aspects of the program. To address this, this global biopharmaceutical company assigned Eraneos to apply a project management approach to assess the current state, identify gaps in enablement and adoption of the program for the brand teams, and develop tailored action plans for 2025. This will enable the client to better translate the global strategies to the local teams.
The approach
A structured project management approach was adopted for the project. First, a comprehensive project charter was developed to guarantee a clear and shared understanding of the project’s objectives, scope and deliverables. A dedicated project team was formed together with the client, and weekly project meetings were scheduled to ensure consistent communication, collaboration and accountability, as well as progress tracking. Next, “Definitions of Done” were established to understand the desired outcome of each capability*, and 2-hour baseline assessment meetings were held with the seven brand teams.
By fostering an open dialogue and encouraging feedback from the teams, a trusting environment was established, ensuring team engagement and honest discussions about progress and challenges. This allowed us to gather insights from the teams into specific challenges in the implementation and adoption of the program within six weeks.
The insights showed that the program’s success depended not only on its implementation, but also on how effectively teams adopted new ways of working. The results were captured as the baseline and analyzed against the Definitions of Done to identify and address gaps across all brand teams. This structured approach with thorough planning and communication effectively drove the execution of the project, whilst keeping the right people accountable.
For meaningful change to happen at the organizational level, we needed every colleague to adopt new ways of working; this project enabled us to scale our assessment down to brand team members and successfully apply change management at the individual level.
The results
Eraneos provided guidance in developing tailored action plans for each brand team and identifying seven affiliate-level initiatives. A total of 49 brand team actions (average of 7 per team) were captured in an overview for the accountable team to keep track of progress and/or exceptions. Ownership was facilitated by assigning a responsible person from the brand team to each action. This enables teams to immediately begin the execution of several of the identified actions. Furthermore, these action plans ensured that the unique needs and challenges were addressed per brand team, thereby accelerating brand team-specific adoption.
Project charters were developed for the seven affiliate projects aimed at driving broader organizational improvements in adoption of the program (related to nine of the 19 capabilities). Project owners were selected to drive these initiatives. Regular stakeholder meetings (monthly for brand team actions and biweekly for affiliate projects) will be conducted to ensure consistent progress, effective communication, and alignment across teams.
The execution of these actions and projects will result in better embedment of the program within the brand teams, enhancing the client’s ability to deliver consistent customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and ultimately provide greater value to customers.
About the client
The client is a global biopharmaceutical company dedicated to addressing complex health challenges through innovative medicines and therapies. With a strong focus on enhancing patient outcomes, they combine advanced science with a customer-centric approach to deliver impactful healthcare solutions. The company emphasizes collaboration, precision, and value in its customer engagement strategies.