Case Study

Designing a Human Experience Function Increases Confidence Among Stakeholders

The Problem

Leaders of a global biotech company identified a lack of clarity around their patients’ overall experience with their own firm as well as ecosystem partners. Leaders also recognized that without dedicated efforts to understand the patient experience, it would remain the same or, perhaps, worsen. The firm set out to build the distinctive capabilities to improve line of sight from the organization to their patients. This is particularly difficult to do in a functional organization which makes it difficult to “see” the patient journey and from that get a holistic view of patient needs.

The Solution

With RBL’s input, the biotech company started by forming a cross-functional team of high potential leaders to research their patient ecosystem. The team took an active role to learn about the patients’ interaction with the entire ecosystem—providers, patients, payers, caregivers, families and so on—gaining insights that helped define a specific set of processes and roles needed to manage a patient journey.

After learning from the patients’ perspective, the cross-functional team suggested a permanent cross-functional front-end organization to serve as a human experience (HeX) function. In an unprecedented step in their industry, the company decided to merge this patient facing organization with HR, IT and several patient touching teams creating a “Human Experience (HeX) Organization.” The new function focused on identifying ongoing patient ecosystem insights, managing the patient journey to ensure that all touchpoints drive the desired experience human experience.

The Outcome

The biotech company leaders and employees now the digital capability to see the link between patient and employee experience. The increased holistic view of the entire ecosystem allows for improved analytics and insights to understand key drivers of leader and employee behavior that impact patient experience. And their choice to create a permanent cross-functional front-end organization will lead to ongoing innovative, digital solutions centered around the needs of the patient. They identified significant areas of cost savings through combining these functions.

They client has quantified the value of acquiring and retaining a single customer and determined the new HeX function will have a large impact on new customer acquisition.

The integration of the “Human Experience Organization” optimizes both the employee and patient experience by:

  • Utilizing digital technology.
  • Creating accountability for patient and employee experience in one organization.
  • Establishing necessary management and measurement for all of these parts together.

Overall, the knowledge gained through this process connects the organization to greater insights and more value-added solutions.