Salesforce BrandVoice: Five Lessons On Customer Experience From Pharma Giant Eli Lilly And Co.

By Nigel Holloway

Empowered employees serve customers better. This six-part series explores the link between employee experience, customer experience and growth as highlighted in the recent Forbes Insights report, “The Experience Equation: How Happy Employees And Customers Accelerate Growth.” To read the full report, click here. Salesforce offers one platform with endless possibilities to help companies boost employee and customer engagement. Click here to learn more.

Colonel Eli Lilly, the founder of Eli Lilly and Co., charged his employees to “take what you find here and make it better and better.” After 140 years, the team at Lilly remains committed to his vision and are driven by the core values of integrity, excellence and respect for people. And their commitment to serving people starts in-house—with creating positive experiences for the employees who bring life to the brand.

Employees play a vital role in the customer journey, whether those customers be patients, healthcare professionals or the communities in which they live. The company first defines which “therapeutic areas” require the most customer understanding. Boosting customer experience then takes its place as a component in the development process, says Christine Hill, global customer experience strategy and measurement leader at Eli Lilly & Co.

As Hill puts it, Lilly seeks to “optimize the customer experience” all the way from drug development to the point where the customer acquires and uses the developed drug. It also endeavors to “scale effectively and efficiently” and ultimately to reinvest in drug discovery, closing the loop.

That said, the relationship between customer experience and financially successful drug development is a complex one. Add in the third factor of employee experience, and it becomes more complex still. Companies such as Lilly that are seeing strong growth can bring these pieces together. Recent research from Forbes Insights and Salesforce surveyed 300 executives across employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) roles and found that companies that prioritized EX to deliver a premium CX achieved 1.8 times faster revenue growth.

To help executives who want to take a fresh approach to this complex interrelationship, Lilly’s experience offers five lessons.

Lesson #1: Stay focused on the value add

Enhancing experiences for your employees and customers are important goals in themselves. But executives should remember that the ultimate goal is to help the company.

“You can go out of business creating great customer experiences if they’re not aligned to the shared value proposition of your company,” says Hill. 

“We have to understand what the shared value proposition is for the employee, the customer and the company, because you can create a lot of positive experiences that really don’t add value,” she adds.

Often, a certain pain point for an employee will also be a pain point for the customer. Hill describes a hypothetical call center where customers are so frustrated by the responses they receive from agents that the agents themselves become demoralized. Improving how the call center works helps customers and employees, and strengthens brand loyalty for both groups.

Lesson #2: You need to know all of your customers

Improving customer experience requires measuring it, which in turn requires mapping it. But that’s a complex task, because customers rarely fall into a single category. Executives at a candy company don’t focus solely on Halloween trick-or-treaters when they tackle customer experience—they also have to think about candy retailers and wholesalers, for instance.

In Lilly’s case, the market consists of not only patients but also healthcare professionals, patient-support groups, insurance companies, entire communities—and so on. 

Mapping customers’ experience helps Lilly’s teams find out which customer interactions align with Lilly’s goals. It also lets them make changes if they need to.

“The key is understanding the interdependencies of these pain points and then figuring out the root causes and the best way to solve them,” she says.

Lesson #3: Identify points of disconnect

Hill says that assessing customer and employee experiences is a challenge because there are few “really hardened facts and operational definitions that are common across most industries or even within an industry.” 

And the assessment is best done in a spirit of open inquiry. When she and her team minutely tracked how their customers engaged with the company, they realized that there were things they thought they knew but actually didn’t, says Hill. “So customer experience mapping actually becomes this continual learning opportunity to research more about the interactions between employees and customers,” she says.

The insights that tracking offers can be surprising: What seems like an insignificant interaction with a customer could actually be “incredibly painful” for them.

Why the disconnect? Most often, Hill says, it’s a result of the fact that “we don’t understand what the customer’s expectations are.”

Lesson #4: Mapping the customer journey is key

To measure customer satisfaction, marketers often use the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures the likelihood that customers will recommend a company.

But as useful as the NPS is, it’s insufficient.

“It doesn’t tell you where you’re disappointing the customer and where you have gaps in the experience you deliver,” says Hill. She adds that NPS, when used as a score and not a complete system, is “at best” a “directional diagnostic.”

Hill cites the example of another hypothetical call center with a high average customer satisfaction score—the constituent numbers of which range from high to low. A smart executive will want to break down that average and figure out why some numbers are so low while others are so high.

Mapping is a “strategic prioritization tool,” she says. “It helps people understand what touchpoints are most important and/or most painful.”

Lesson #5: Aligning revenue growth and the experiences of customers and employees pays big dividends

Again, the goal of engaging employees and improving customer experience is to add corporate value. But improving results depends on integrating customer experience management and employee experience management, Hill says. Our research found that this alignment is key: executives from companies with higher-than-average employee experience emphasize that shaping operational strategy to enhance the customer experience is the best way to boost revenue.

“When people know how their work matters to a customer, it increases their alignment, their engagement, their innovation and their collaboration,” Hill says. Good employee morale means good employee output.

Aligning the experience of customers to that of employees with the goal of improving results can be a complex task. But the rewards can be significant. In Hill’s words, the impact of such a project on value can be “significant and inspiring.”

Nigel Holloway is a freelance writer and was deputy editor of Forbes Global from 1997 to 2002. He has been writing for Forbes Insights since 2017.

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