Sales force effectiveness is a high priority in the global pharmaceutical market as the pressure to ensure return on investment (ROI) is increasing.
Pharmaceutical companies have been leveraging the benefits of their customer relationship management (CRM) applications for many years now. However, the demand to improve efficiency and reduce costs across the sales team continues. The need to deploy faster, flexible and more cost-effective solutions is evolving and becoming more important than ever before.
This blog highlights an industry best practice, describing how we have partnered with our client, a top ten pharmaceutical company, to better align their regional IT department in China and our service desk to dramatically improve the Veeva help desk resolution rate from 87.5% to 95.4% in 6 months, and maintain stability above 96% after the first 6 months.
Increased Access
First, to improve the FCR (first case resolution), and minimize escalations, we recommended providing selected service desk resources (Level 2 and SMEs) with a Veeva “delegated admin” role, which granted them proper access to Veeva system. This included: ability to log-in as a user to simulate user experience; reset passwords; user administration; list maintenance; and unlock calls. Our client agreed, and the enhanced access to the Veeva system broadened their reach so more cases could be resolved at level 1. This also enabled service desk agents to learn more about the Veeva application and end-user software experiences, which significantly helped the agents with end-user communications on service problems and resolutions.
The results were encouraging. The number of escalated cases dropped from 17% to 7% of the total and the number of cases resolved at level 1 increased from 83% to 93%.
Increased Communication
Second, our client proactively arranged meetings to bring together our service desk agents, and their IT department, to discuss action plans on knowledge transfer, system update, etc. –a well-established process involving level 1, level 2 service representatives and the client’s IT team to ensure we retained the innovations and accelerated the rate of change.
Continuous Process Improvement
Third, with the cooperation of our client, we took below measures to further improve and stabilize the FCR: Our partnership with the client quickly established a continuous improvement team culture founded in self-learning and collective team training. The service desk agents have consolidated and improved their Veeva knowledge, learned how to better summarize the case interactions, and adapted the training and improvement plan according to the summary findings and knowledge base. For example, recognizing the Chinese preference for telephone interactions vs. email or chat.
The Results
To date, 11 agents have completed Veeva CRM administrator training and received certification.
By joint efforts of our clients IT department and our service desk agents, the Veeva CRM resolution rate has increased significantly from initially 87.5% to 95.4% in six short months – a 7.5% improvement! And this number has remained stable above 96%.
However, it’s more than just handling service desk calls more efficiently. It’s about program value enhancements too.
Benchmarking helps us to compare and contrast results from similar industries and clients with the opportunity to leverage best practices to identify improvement opportunities.
As more pharmaceutical companies migrate to the Veeva platform to increase speed to market, collaboration and operational efficiency, the importance of Veeva service desk support cannot be neglected. Choosing an experienced service desk provider with an in-depth understanding of the Veeva help desk application and its use in support of a pharmaceutical sales team is essential. We have demonstrated that support of the Veeva application is a team sport.
